Customer Reviews

PL/I Structured Programming

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I needed a reference manual for PL/I and decided to go for this book. It is very good if you are new to the language or are trying to remember what a particular function does. It even has separate sections at the back of the book for ASCII and EBCDIC tables, how the different PL/I data formats are stored in records, and a good summary at the back showing which functions are supported by the various PL/I compilers and subsets. It is not a the cheapest (hardback) book on PL/I but is well worth the investment.

This book is utilized as a standard reference guide within our PL/I programming group. It doubles as a training reference for new PL/I programmers and as a general desk reference for programmers with more advanced PL/I programming skills. The overall content is well organized and easy to use.

Robin Vowel's book compliments Hughe's book for a variety of algorithms and none-MVS platforms (emphasizing certain PL/I facilities well).

NB.
Caution with inexpensive used copies. They may not be the latest edtion. Previous editions are more verbose.

I bought this book with no great expectations. The material available on PL/I programming is not profuse and if you find something that looks interesting, it ends up being generic or lacking on the language details.

However, I found this book, extremely useful. Not only for the PL/I syntax and samples but also because of the way it has been written and the information included in each one of the final sections, that makes of this book an excellent investment.