Rodnay Zaks

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{{short description|American computer programmer and author (born 1946)}}

{{Infobox writer

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| name = Rodnay Zaks

| honorific_suffix = PhD

| image = Rodnay zaks, 25 novembre 1978 Paris.png

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| caption = Rodnay Zaks, 1978

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| birth_date = {{Birth date and age|1946|02|10|df=y}}

| birth_place = Paris, France

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| occupation = Book author, editor

| language = English

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| alma_mater = École Centrale Paris
University of California, Berkeley

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| genre = non-fiction

| subject = Computers, APL, microprocessors

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| notableworks = Programming the Z80
Programming the 6502

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| years_active = 1970–present

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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{{cite book |last=Zaks |first=Rodnay |date=1980 |title=Programming the Z80 |url=http://www.z80.info/zaks.html |isbn=0-89588-094-6}} and Programming the 6502.{{cite book |first=Rodnay |last=Zaks |title=Programming the 6502 |year=1983 |page= 348 |url=https://archive.org/details/Programming_the_6502_OCR |publisher=Sybex |isbn=0895881357}} 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.

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{{cite book |last=Zaks |first=Rodnay |title=A Microprogrammed APL Implementation |location=Berkeley, California |publisher=Sybex |year=1978 |isbn=0-89588-005-9}} which includes the complete source code listing for the microcode for a Digital Scientific Corporation Meta 4 microprogrammable processor implementing the programming language APL.