C. Thomas Wu is currently a Professor in the Computer Science Department at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA. He received his B.A. in Mathematics and M.S. from San Diego State University. His Ph.D. in Computer Science was completed at the University of California, San Diego in 1983. After graduating, he was an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Northwestern University for a couple of years before joining the faculty at the Naval Postgraduate School.

Wu became interested in writing a CS1 book through his interests and commitment to teaching object-oriented programming to beginners. His other fields of interest include databases, specifically object-oriented databases and database design, and Robotics.