Customer Reviews

CL Programming for the AS/400--2nd edition

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3 star:		(1)
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For all of you in the iSeries and AS/400 market looking at books you already know every single one of the books for our favorite server is way, way, way over priced. I know why, but at the same time I don't care for that reasoning.

The book is pretty good for someone who is a programmer already, not for anyone who is new to writing CL or RPG on the AS/400.
Greg covers a good range of topics and then reinforces it which good questions at the end of each chapter. If you are trying to learn then Greg is definitely helping you down this path.

Overall I like the book. I got a good bit of use out of it in the first week or so. I would recommend it to anyone who is trying to get more from CL type scripting on the AS/400.
Now again back to the price. This is kind of a rant, but $70 for a book that is only 328 pages long with really nice sized text is way too much. That .21 cents a page as compared to other technical books like the one on Domino Development from IBM that is $60 and 944 pages with smaller text which looks like .06 cents per page. Now I know that the Domino book is going to sell more copies, but then again I get paid the same thing to write Domino programs as I do CL...Maybe I should reworked my contract to reflect the high price of iSeries Books.

To wrap this up: Good Book, Too Much $$$, but a good reference when you get tired of searching IBM's PDFs.

CL Programming for the IBM AS/400 is a good textbook for learning CL programming on the AS/400 / iSeries / IBM i. The book can also be used as a great reference manual.

The book covers many areas of the CL language, first by introducing you to the language itself, then into topics such as the structure of a CL program, expressions, program logic, parameter passing, message and error handling, as well as display file and database file processing.

Even after almost 20 years of its publication, the book will still be very useful for IBM i system administrators and developers alike.

Ordered the book, but a refund was initiated apparently because the book isn't available although I am not exactly sure.