Sams Teach Yourself COBOL in 24 Hours teaches the basics of COBOL programming in 24 step-by-step lessons. Each lesson builds on the previous one providing a solid foundation in COBOL programming concepts and techniques. This hands-on guide is the easiest, fastest way to begin creating standard COBOL compliant code. Business professionals and programmers from other languages will find this hands-on, task-oriented tutorial extremely useful for learning the essential features and concepts of COBOL programming. Writing a program can be a complex task. Concentrating on one development tool guides you to good results every time. There will be no programs that will not compile!
Beginning COBOL for Programmers is a comprehensive, sophisticated tutorial and modular skills reference on the COBOL programming language for established programmers. This book is for you if you are a developer who would like to—or must—add COBOL to your repertoire. Perhaps you recognize the opportunities presented by the current COBOL skills crisis, or are working in a mission critical enterprise which retains legacy COBOL applications. Whatever your situation, Beginning COBOL for Programmers meets your needs as an established programmer moving to COBOL. Beginning COBOL for Programmers includes comprehensive coverage of ANS 85 COBOL features and techniques, including control structures, condition names, sequential and direct access files, data redefinition, string handling, decimal arithmetic, subprograms, and the report writer. The final chapter includes a substantial introduction to object-oriented COBOL. Benefiting from over one hundred example programs, you’ll receive an extensive introduction to the core and advanced features of the COBOL language and will learn to apply these through comprehensive and varied exercises. If you've inherited some legacy COBOL, you’ll be able to grasp the COBOL idioms, understand the constructs, and recognize what's happening in the code you’re working with. Today’s enterprise application developers will find that COBOL skills open new—or old—doors, and this extensive COBOL reference is the book to help you acquire and develop your COBOL skills.
Join the more than 150,000 programmers who have learned CICS using CICS books alone. Now, the two-part CICS for the COBOL Programmer has been revised into a single volume that meets today's need for fast-paced training. Readers get all the commands and features that are current today--plus, new chapters on creating web or component-based programs--in just 630, information-packed pages.
This is the latest edition of our classic COBOL book that has set the standard for structured design and coding since the mid-1970s. So if you want to learn how to write COBOL programs the way they're written in the best enterprise COBOL shops, this is the book for you. And when you're done learning from this book, it becomes the best reference you'll ever find for use on the job. Throughout the book, you will learn how to use COBOL on IBM mainframes because that's where 90% or more of all COBOL is running. But to work on a mainframe, you need to know more than just the COBOL language. That's why this book also shows you: how to use the ISPF editor for entering programs; how to use TSO/E and JCL to compile and test programs; how to use the AMS utility to work with VSAM files; how to use CICS for developing interactive COBOL programs; how to use DB2 for developing COBOL programs that handle database data; how to maintain legacy programs. If you want to learn COBOL for other platforms, this book will get you off to a good start because COBOL is a standard language. In fact, all of the COBOL that's presented in this book will also run on any other platform that has a COBOL compiler. Remember, though, that billions of lines of mainframe COBOL are currently in use, and those programs will keep programmers busy for many years to come.
For companies moving their COBOL applications from older mainframes to AS/400, this book cover the specific tools from COBOL 400 that programmers need to convert and develop their applications.
If you are looking for a practical DB2 book that focuses on application programming, this is the book for you. Written from the programmer's point of view, it will quickly teach you what you need to know to access and process DB2 data in your COBOL programs using embedded SQL. This second edition has been thoroughly updated and expanded to make it even more valuable to the programmer who is slugging it out on the job. You will learn: the critical DB2 concepts that let you understand how DB2 works; the basic DB2 coding features you will use in every program you write; how to use version 4 enhancements like outer joins and explicit syntax for inner joins; how to work with column functions, scalar functions, and subqueries to manipulate data; how to use error handling techniques and ROLLBACK to protect DB2 data; why program efficiency is vital under DB2... and more.
The classic guide to programming in COBOL-updated, expanded, and even more user-friendly than before Advanced Cobol, Third Edition For many years, Gary Brown's classic guide to advanced COBOL has been the on-the-job reference of choice for experienced COBOL programmers internationally. Without compromising on any of the outstanding features that made it so successful, this Third Edition has been updated and expanded to reflect all the important new trends and applications in COBOL programming. Packed with dozens of concise examples illustrating language features, and featuring several complete programs, this indispensable working resource arms you with practical coverage of: * All essential COBOL terms, concepts, and statements * COBOL programming solutions to the Y2K problem * Full Screen terminal support, subprograms and functions, and COBOL Report Writer * Items in proposed new ANSI Standard * Object-oriented COBOL * Obsolete statements and how to work around them * COBOL for client/server and distributed computing * Cross-system development * Application programming interfaces Wiley Computer Publishing. Timely. Practical. Reliable. Visit our Web site at www.wiley.com/compbooks/
Grace Hopper's remarkable innovations in computing led to COBOL, which for decades was the most widely used programming language in the world. Everlasting Code offers an in-depth look at Hopper's work, while also chronicling the entire history of COBOL. The development of COBOL (COmmon Business-Oriented Language) was the strangest, wildest, and most dramatic story in the early history of computing. Everlasting Code covers it all, from Grace Hopper's pioneering work with compilers to the many contentious committee meetings that repeatedly put the birth of the language in jeopardy; from the race to build the world's first COBOL compiler to the numerous standardization efforts; and from the Y2K bug to the COVID-19 pandemic, times when public scapegoating of COBOL shifted into high gear. Even though it was the work of a committee and she was only indirectly involved in its creation, COBOL has Grace Hopper's fingerprints all over it. Therefore, since Everlasting Code tells two interrelated stories (that of Hopper's breakthroughs as well as the history of COBOL), the book is split into two parts. In the first part, we meet one of the most prolific computer scientists of the twentieth century and examine how Hopper's varied life experiences--as a student, professor, military officer, and programmer--led to her revolutionary ideas, setting the stage for the birth of COBOL. Hopper developed some of the earliest working compilers--programs that translated human-readable source code into machine code, a language computers could make sense of--including MATH-MATIC, for algebraic problems, and FLOW-MATIC, for data processing. Source code for Hopper's compilers had to be written in a form of everyday English, which proved eminently readable to some people and endlessly frustrating for others. FLOW-MATIC was the key influence for COBOL, as we discover in the second part of Everlasting Code. By the late 1950s, with the FORTRAN programming language dominating the engineering, scientific, and mathematical landscape, the need for a corresponding business data-processing language emerged. With Grace Hopper's full support, in early 1959 a programmer named Mary Hawes publicly suggested developing an industrywide common business language (CBL) capable of running the same programs on different computers. Thanks to Hopper's many government and military connections, the U.S. Department of Defense sponsored the CBL effort, taking the unprecedented step of bringing together many competing manufacturers and computer users for a high-stakes meeting at the Pentagon. Before long, subcommittees of CODASYL (the Committee on Data Systems Languages, which was formed to write the CBL) were at war with each other. Meanwhile, the chairman of CODASYL received a mysterious crated package. Inside was a tombstone with a reclining lamb statuette at the top and a single word engraved on the front: COBOL. Was this intended as a threat? Did someone want the language dead? Or was the tombstone merely delivering a warning: That if CODASYL couldn't get its act together, COBOL was sure to die an early death? Author Mark Jones Lorenzo takes you behind the scenes and inside the meeting rooms where the fate of a programming language hung in the balance. Filled with intrigue, conflict, suspense, drama, technical details, and the biographies of many larger-than-life personalities, Everlasting Code traces the precedents, the development, and the history of the COBOL programming language, which came to rule the world.
COBOL for Students has established itself as one of the most successful teaching texts on COBOL programming and is now in its fourth edition. The first part of the book concentrates on the fundamentals of the language and takes students to the point where they can write modestly sized programs using sequential files. Part two assumes competence in elementary COBOL and explains design and other programming techniques which should be part of the professional programmer's repertoire. Part three extends the student's knowledge of the language by explaining some of the more advanced features of COBOL.Written for students learning COBOL for the first time, it takes the reader from the basic fundamentals right through to some of the more advanced features in one handy, and inexpensive volume. As many lecture courses have been based upon earlier editions of this book, this edition maintains the highly successful style and format and has been updated to include the 'Intrinsic Function Module for COBOL'. (This is the ANSI Standard X3.23a-1989 (COBOL 89) which has also been adopted as ISO International Standard 1989 Addendum 1 (an addendum to the ANSI Standard X3.23-1985 (COBOL 85)) and consists mainly of 42 predefined functions related to many different application areas).
