The Power of COBOL: for Systems Developers of the 21st Century [Paperback]

RUI BIVAR DE OLIVEIRA (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 740 pages
• Publisher: Mark Cooper (October 12, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0620346523
• ISBN-13: 978-0620346528
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7 x 2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #708,412 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars After 20 years of struggle, this put me back on track, August 26, 2008

By 

PIETER GREYLING (Santiago, Chile) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Power of COBOL: for Systems Developers of the 21st Century (Paperback)

I started with Cobol 23 years ago with the Manie Van Zyl en Frank Pritchard COBOL night course in Johannesburg. I was scheduled to do the full-time day course by my employer but I had a motor vehicle accident before so this was the next best thing. After that I was employed doing paper filing to justify my salary and finally got a chance to "mess about" with EasyTrieve, JCL etc. in the country-wide branch batch systems. I met some really amazing people. They could read an IBM mainframe dump while glancing at it through a glass and pinpointing the source of the abend. Then they shipped me off to full-time COBOL school again. Here I learned the principles. I was an undisciplined student with other agendas in life but then something about this paper-based programming started to grow on me. I did not pass with a wonderfull grade but at least I passed. Manie and Frank were hard-core so passing their course was an achievement. No IT graduate was allowed to work in the bank until they had gone through this.

Not that I was graduated - mostly a wandering philosophical type. Perhaps in a totally understandable way, COBOL took hold of me.

Then I worked in COBOL with the masters, the night warriors you never saw in the day. The girls and guys that could pick apart a dump as if it were an ancient manuscript. Nothng since then has ever impressed me more in IT.

In the following 20 years I went through 4GL's, VB, C, C++, Java, Delphi, back to the mainframe with PL/I for 3 years, then .NET. And some more .NET, and still some more. C#, VB.NET... I discovered Perl and Python 10 years ago and used them.

But somewhere I could not forget those days of the giants. Not even PL/I could return me.

Then, just when I was starting to be desperate in wishing there was a simple way to do software with .NET, my wife told me that COBOL is very much alive. She shocked me. How did she know that I was becoming depressed after battling with so many runtimes year after year. She gave me the light.

And I found this book. This book has the spirit than not many will remember. But perhaps I am wrong. To all my old friends out there, buy this book and you will keep it close.

Rui has done a mammoth job. I salute this work.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Best Cobol Book I have come accross, November 29, 2006

By 

serogole - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Power of COBOL: for Systems Developers of the 21st Century (Paperback)

The last time I used Cobol it still Cobol 74, and I have ever since gone on to newer technologies. So why do I need Cobol? As a freelance I find that many of my clients, especially the bigger financial institutions, still rely on Cobol for high-volume transactional processing - many ATM transactions are handled by Cobol programs.

So, even though Cobol is not my first choice programming language anymore, I come across it quite often.

At long last I have found a book that has updated my Cobol knowledge comprehensively. My confidence level with regards to Cobol is now so high that I feel like I can walk into a class and teach the subject as I used to 17 years ago - that is how good this book is as a tutorial, and it is just as good as a reference:

thank you Rui, you are a great teacher.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Well structured, well organized and easy to understand technical book, December 26, 2007

By 

P. Prager - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Power of COBOL: for Systems Developers of the 21st Century (Paperback)

This is one of the best structured and organized programming books I came across. I used COBOL a long time ago but wanted to see what's new with the language and came across this book at a conference. It appealed to me so much that made it standard for our COBOL development team. The definitions are concise and easy to understand, the examples are short and sweet and most of all relevant, and the text easy to follow.

I am not sure why a previous reviewer thought that the author's English is not up to par - I had no such impression.

The Appendix is also very useful and provides a detailed outline in each chapter.

In any case, I recommend this book to anyone involved with COBOL programming, especially if they are new to the language or need a refresher about its new features.