| Parent company | Pearson Education |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1913 |
| Founder | Charles Gerstenberg and Richard Ettinger |
| Country of origin | United States |
| Headquarters location | Upper Saddle River, New Jersey |
| Publication types | Books |
| Official website | prenticehall.com (education), www.informit.com (professional) |
Prentice Hall is a major educational publisher. It is an imprint of Pearson Education, Inc., based in Upper Saddle River, New Jersey, USA. Prentice Hall publishes print and digital content for the 6-12 and higher-education market. Prentice Hall distributes its technical titles through the Safari Books Online e-reference service.
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On October 13, 1913, law professor Dr. Charles Gerstenberg and his student Richard Ettinger founded Prentice Hall. Gerstenberg and Ettinger took their mothers' maiden names—Prentice and Hall—to name their new company.[1]
Prentice Hall was acquired by Gulf+Western in 1984, and became part of that company's publishing division Simon & Schuster. Publication of trade books ended in 1991. Simon & Schuster's educational division, including Prentice Hall, was sold to Pearson by G+W successor Viacom in 1998.
Prentice Hall is the publisher of Magruder's American Government as well as Biology by Ken Miller and Joe Levine. Their artificial intelligence series includes Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach by Stuart J. Russell and Peter Norvig and ANSI Common Lisp by Paul Graham. They also published the well-known computer programming book The C Programming Language by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie.
A Prentice Hall subsidiary, Reston Publishing, was in the foreground of technical-book publishing when microcomputers were first becoming available. It was still unclear who would be buying and using "personal computers," and the scarcity of useful software and instruction created a publishing market niche whose target audience yet had to be defined. In the spirit of the pioneers who made PCs possible, Reston Publishing's editors addressed non-technical users with the reassuring, and mildly experimental, Computer Anatomy for Beginners by Marlin Ouverson of People's Computer Company. They followed with a collection of books that was generally by and for programmers, building a stalwart list of titles relied on by many in the first generation of microcomputers users.