Charles Petzold
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Charles Petzold (born February 2, 1953) is an American programmer and technical author on Microsoft Windows applications. He is also a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional and was named one of Microsoft's seven
Windows Pioneers The Windows Pioneers are the seven individuals who received awards from Microsoft in 1994 in recognition of their contributions to Microsoft Windows. Bill Gates presented each pioneer with an award. The seven Windows Pioneers were: * Alan Cooper â ...
.


Biography

He graduated with a
Master of Science A Master of Science ( la, Magisterii Scientiae; abbreviated MS, M.S., MSc, M.Sc., SM, S.M., ScM or Sc.M.) is a master's degree in the field of science awarded by universities in many countries or a person holding such a degree. In contrast t ...
in Mathematics from
Stevens Institute of Technology Stevens Institute of Technology is a private research university in Hoboken, New Jersey. Founded in 1870, it is one of the oldest technological universities in the United States and was the first college in America solely dedicated to mechanical ...
in 1975. Aside from writing books about Windows programming he has contributed to various magazines about computers. He had an interest in electronic music and in 1977 started building electronic music instruments out of CMOS chips. In 1979, Petzold started building a computer-controlled digital electronic music synthesizer based on the
Zilog Z80 The Z80 is an 8-bit microprocessor introduced by Zilog as the startup company's first product. The Z80 was conceived by Federico Faggin in late 1974 and developed by him and his 11 employees starting in early 1975. The first working samples were ...
microprocessor A microprocessor is a computer processor where the data processing logic and control is included on a single integrated circuit, or a small number of integrated circuits. The microprocessor contains the arithmetic, logic, and control circ ...
. This experience of digital circuitry and assembly language programming formed the basis of his book ''Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software''. Petzold purchased a two-diskette IBM PC in 1984 for $5,000. This debt encouraged him to use the PC to earn some revenue so he wrote an article about
ANSI.SYS ANSI.SYS is a device driver in the DOS family of operating systems that provides extra console functions through ANSI escape sequences. It is partially based upon a subset of the text terminal control standard proposed by the ANSI X3L2 Technical C ...
and the PROMPT command. This was submitted to PC Magazine for which they paid $800. This was the beginning of Petzold's career as a paid writer. In 1984, PC Magazine decided to do a review of printers. They asked all current New York contributors to help with the review. Petzold showed the staff some small assembly-language programs he had written. Soon he was busy writing little 300-500 byte
.COM The domain name .com is a top-level domain (TLD) in the Domain Name System (DNS) of the Internet. Added at the beginning of 1985, its name is derived from the word ''commercial'', indicating its original intended purpose for domains registere ...
file utilities for PC Magazine. Petzold was soon getting so much freelance work from PC Magazine that he was able to quit his job.
Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washin ...
then decided that '' Microsoft Systems Journal'' would cover both
DOS DOS is shorthand for the MS-DOS and IBM PC DOS family of operating systems. DOS may also refer to: Computing * Data over signalling (DoS), multiplexing data onto a signalling channel * Denial-of-service attack (DoS), an attack on a communicat ...
and Windows programming. Jonathan Lazarus, who contracted with Microsoft, recruited Petzold to write some articles. Petzold wrote the article ''A Step-by-Step Guide to Building Your First Windows Application''" for MSJ, Vol.1, No. 2 (December 1986) which he believes was the first article about Windows programming to appear in a magazine. Petzold told some people at a Microsoft-related function that he really enjoyed writing this type of article. This news was relayed to
Microsoft Press Microsoft Press is the publishing arm of Microsoft, usually releasing books dealing with various current Microsoft technologies. Microsoft Press' first introduced books were ''The Apple Macintosh Book'' by Cary Lu and ''Exploring the IBM PCjr H ...
editor-in-chief Susan Lammers. This resulted in Petzold being contracted to write the first edition of ''Programming Windows'' from January until August 1987.


Bibliography

* ''Creating Mobile Apps with Xamarin.Forms'' Cross-platform C# programming for iOS, Android, and Windows Phon

* ''Programming Windows Sixth Edition'' Writing Windows 8 Apps with C# and XAML (Microsoft Press, 2012, 1136 pages) * ''Programming Windows Phone 7 Series'' (Microsoft Press, This book is currently out and was first published in the fall of 2010
(free download)
* ''
The Annotated Turing ''The Annotated Turing: A Guided Tour Through Alan Turing’s Historic Paper on Computability and the Turing Machine'' is a book by Charles Petzold, published in 2008 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Petzold annotates Alan Turing's paper "On Computab ...
: A Guided Tour through Alan Turing's Historic Paper on Computability and the Turing Machine'' (Wiley, 2008) * ''3D Programming for Windows - Three-Dimensional Graphics Programming for the Windows Presentation Foundation'' (Microsoft Press, 2007) *
.NET Book Zero What the C or C++ Programmer Needs to Know about C# and the .NET Framework (free download)
' * ''Applications = Code + Markup - A Guide to the Microsoft Windows Presentation Foundation'' (Microsoft Press, 2006) * ''Programming Microsoft Windows Forms'' (Microsoft Press, 2005; 384 pages) * ''Programming in the Key of C#: A Primer for Aspiring Programmers'' (Microsoft Press, 2003; 418 pages) * ''Programming Microsoft Windows with C#'' (Microsoft Press, 2001; 1290 pages) * '' Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software'' (Microsoft Press, 1999; 393 pages. Second edition: 2022, 480 pages) * ''Programming Windows, Fifth Edition'' (Microsoft Press, 1998; 1479 pages)


Out-of-print books

* ''Programming Microsoft Windows with Microsoft Visual Basic .NET'' (Microsoft Press, 2002; 1303 pages) * ''Programming Windows 95, 4th edition'' (Microsoft Press, 1996; 1100 pages) * ''Programming the OS/2 Presentation Manager'' (Microsoft Press, 1989) * ''Programming Windows 3.1, 3rd edition'' (Microsoft Press, 1992; 983 pages) * ''Programming Windows, 2nd edition.'' (Microsoft Press, 1990) * ''Programming the OS/2 Presentation Manager'' (Ziff-Davis Press, 1994; 934 pages) * ''Programming Windows, 1st edition'' (Microsoft Press, 1988; 852 pages)


Books that were never published

* ''Graphics Programming in Windows'' * ''The OS/2 Graphics Programming Interface''


Contributor

* Contributor to ''Beautiful Code: Leading Programmers Explain How They Think'', edited by Andy Oram & Greg Wilson (O'Reilly, 2007) * Contributor to ''Extending DOS'', edited by Ray Duncan (2nd edition, Addison Wesley, 1992) * Contributor to ''Microsoft Press Computer Dictionary'' (Microsoft Press, 1991) * Contributor to ''Extending DOS'', edited by Ray Duncan (Addison Wesley, 1990) * Contributor to ''The MS-DOS Encyclopedia'', edited by Ray Duncan (Microsoft Press, 1988) (xix+1570 pages; 26 cm) (NB. This edition was published in 1988 after extensive rework of the withdrawn 1986 first edition by a different team of authors


Magazines

* ''PC Magazine'' ** Contributing Editor (1985 to 2005) ** PC Tutor column (1985 to 1987) ** Environments column (1987 to 1995) * ''Microsoft Systems Journal'' ** Contributing Editor (1987 to 2000) * ''Windows Sources'' ** Contributing Editor and Columnist (1993) * ''MSDN Magazine'' ** Contributing Editor (2000 to 2014)


Online articles

*
Maxwell, Molecules, and Evolution
' *

' *
Articles for MSDN magazine
'


References


External links


Web site for Petzold's book The Annotated Turing


transcript of a talk delivered at the NYC .NET Developer’s Group, October 20, 2005 {{DEFAULTSORT:Petzold, Charles 1953 births Living people Microsoft Windows people Stevens Institute of Technology alumni American computer programmers People from New Brunswick, New Jersey