Rodnay Zaks

Rodnay Zaks (born 10 February 1946, Paris) is a French-born American author of many books on computer programming, including the seminal Programming the Z80^[1] and Programming the 6502.^[2] He is the founder of independent computer book publisher Sybex and was its president and chief executive officer (CEO) until its takeover by John Wiley & Sons in May 2005.

Rodnay Zaks PhD
Rodnay Zaks, 1978
Born	(1946-02-10) 10 February 1946 (age 79) Paris, France
Occupation	Book author, editor
Language	English
Alma mater	École Centrale Paris University of California, Berkeley
Genre	non-fiction
Subject	Computers, APL, microprocessors
Years active	1970–present
Notable works	Programming the Z80 Programming the 6502

Zaks has an engineering degree from the École Centrale Paris and a master's degree from the University of California, Berkeley, where he also was the third person to receive a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) from the then new computer science department. He began a career in training engineers and managers in the then new microprocessor technology, and subsequently founded Sybex in 1976.

Zaks has been a director of Association for Computing Machinery's (ACM) Special Interest Group on Microarchitecture (SIGMICRO), and founded the non-profit organization EUROMICRO.

An early publication of Zaks' from Sybex was A microprogrammed APL implementation^[3] which includes the complete source code listing for the microcode for a Digital Scientific Corporation Meta 4 microprogrammable processor implementing the programming language APL.

Selected publications

• Zaks, Rodnay (September 1971). Microprogrammed APL. Fifth IEEE Computer Conference Proceedings. p. 193.
• Zaks, Rodnay (June 1972). A Microprogrammed APL Implementation (PhD). University of California, Berkeley.
• Zaks, Rodnay; Steingart, David; Moore, Jeffrey (18–20 May 1971). "A firmware APL time-sharing system". AFIPS '71 (Spring): Proceedings of the 18–20 May 1971, spring joint computer conference. Spring joint computer conference (SJCC). Vol. 38. AFIPS Press. pp. 179–190. doi:10.1145/1478786.1478812. ISBN 978-1-4503-7907-6.
• Zaks, Rodnay (12–14 October 1976). Euromicro Symposium on Microprocessing and Microprogramming (2nd, papers). Second Euromicro Symposium on Microprocessing and Microprogramming. Venice, Italy.
• Nicoud, Jean-Daniel; Wilmink, Jan; Zaks, Rodnay, eds. (3–6 October 1977). Microcomputer Architectures: Third Euromicro Symposium on Microprocessing and Microprogramming. Euromicro Symposium on Microprocessing and Microprogramming. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Elsevier Science.
• Hartenstein, Reiner; Zaks, Rodnay, eds. (23–25 June 1975). Workshop on the Microarchitecture of Computer Systems. Workshop on the Microarchitecture of Computer Systems. Nice, France.