about the author

Ronald Mak is a highly rated instructor of object-­oriented analysis and design in C++, Java, and Python at San José State University in Silicon Valley. As a senior computer scientist at NASA and JPL, he developed software for major missions such as the Mars rovers and the Orion spacecraft. He was also a research staff member at IBM Research and an enterprise software strategist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Earlier in his career, he was a senior software developer and engineering manager at various Silicon Valley companies such as Apple and Sun Microsystems. He has degrees in the mathematical sciences and in computer science from Stanford University. He is an inventor on seven software patents, and he has written books on compiler development, software engineering, and numerical computation that have been translated into several languages. Despite having done work on the relative motions of planets and performed calculations that involved Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, Ron is still amazed that the sun comes up each morning and that bicycles don’t tip over.