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. I was not an actuary, but I did actuarial work and PL/I programming for individual health insurance product development.

In 1984 I began writing for PC Magazine, which 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.

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, will be 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.