Charles Petzold


I am the author of a dozen books, most notably two unique explorations of digital computing:

I grew up in New Jersey and attended Stevens Institute of Technology. After graduating in 1975 with a BS and MS in mathematics, I moved to New York City and worked 10 years for a major insurance company. Although not an actuary, I did actuarial work and PL/I programming for individual health insurance product development.

In 1977 I began exploring how I could build electronic music instruments. This led to a self-taught education in digital electronics, and (within a couple years) to designing and building a digital electronic music synthesizer controlled by a homebrew computer based around the Zilog Z80 microprocessor. This project is documented in "Adventures in Electronic Music: Beeps, Bloops, and Klangs: 1974–1982". I later used much of the knowledge and experience I gained from this project to write my book Code.

I acquired my first IBM PC in early 1984 and began writing for PC Magazine that same year. This led to a full-time freelance career that included writing for Microsoft Systems Journal and MSDN magazines. My book Programming Windows was published in six editions between 1988 and 2012, and I also wrote books on OS/2, Windows Forms, the Windows Presentation Foundation, and the C# programming language. In 2014 I began working as a full-time employee for Xamarin (which was acquired in 2016 by Microsoft), where I wrote a book and documentation about Xamarin.Forms.

In September 2018 I retired from my 34-year career of writing, speaking, and thinking about application programming interfaces. Links to my books and articles from that career are available on my old website.

Throughout the year 2020 I celebrated the 250th anniversary of the birth of Beethoven with daily tweets of YouTube videos of all of Beethoven's music in chronological order. These tweets have been collected and organized in the website The Complete Beethoven.

Since 2007 I have been married to author, activist, and historian Deirdre Sinnott, whose first novel, The Third Mrs. Galway, set in Utica, New York in 1835, was published by Akashic Books in 2021.

I am currently working on what I hope to be a series of books on the historical, social, political, and philosophical foundations of computing. Tentative titles are:

Wish me luck.