[2] 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[3] which includes the complete source code listing for the microcode for a Digital Scientific Corporation Meta 4 microprogrammable processor implementing the programming language APL.