Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

The Power of COBOL
My first reaction to the Power of COBOL is wow! Quite an effort. I applaud Rui de Oliveira. The Power of COBOL goes well beyond COBOL and perhaps ought to be called The Power of the COBOL Application Development Environment (ADL). However I recognize that may scare some people away. The book certainly is worthy of that title.
Specific comments:
- Online and in the book, invite readers to ask for clarification of something not understood (email or write to the author). It's a great way for authors to get readers to be constructive reviewers.
- At first, I could not tell who was your audience for the book. Were you writing to non-programmers? Were you writing to non-COBOL-programmers? Were you writing to experienced (COBOL) programmers wanting to learn about OO COBOL or COBOL 2002 syntax, etc.? As I delved deeper into the book I saw that you are writing to all of the above, and more (IT beginners, experienced IT professionals, etc.) This makes it an asset rather than a liability. It should be promoted that way.
The Power of COBOL is an excellent:
a) reference book (for both COBOL and more specifically COBOL 2002),
b) business IT basics,
c) primer for Object Oriented systems in general and OO COBOL syntax specifically, SQL databases, etc.
The scope of the book as mentioned earlier goes beyond the COBOL language. If one is presenting an IT course using this book as the curriculum guide, it is quite an extensive (and wonderful) course.
The Table of Contents at the beginning is extensive, but the Index at the end is not. I believe in a robust (perhaps over-zealous) alphabetical Index. The ToC reflects how the author laid out the book; the Index reflects how readers often access the book.
The use of tables, charts, rubriks and particularly syntax examples throughout is wonderful.
The book presents the OO COBOL syntax well, with excellent examples. This will be useful to experienced COBOL (non-2002) programmers and others.
I compliment Rui Biivar de Oliveira.

I wrote and taught COBOL many years ago (before I started getting this darn gray stuff in my hair). Even then, programmers and students alike dreamed of a book like this. What an excellent reference and manual!

If you need to know anything about COBOL, then, in my opinion, this book by Mr. De Oliveira should be your source.

I think that it is excellently structured and easy to follow, and still provides the depth that we need to be top-grade COBOL programmers. I've seen many books that purported to be the best over the years, but none as good as this.

I'm a programmer who normally works in C++ and Java but a new assignment has me working in the mainframe. As I've used dozens of books in the past to learn new technology I picked up this book hoping it would be a means of clearly learning COBOL. I am far from impressed.

1. The book has typos. Couple this with the fact that English is obviously not the author's first language and you're well on your way to frustration trying to figure out what he's saying.

2. In his example code he frequently envokes COBOL concepts that he is a few chapters away from explaining. I was frequently Googling as I was reading to try and figure out what a piece of code did. One concept I remember in particular, switches/flags (level 88's), was one I had to surf the web to explain.

I'm guessing that the people who gave this book five stars had already been working with COBOL for a number of years and didn't need to learn it from scratch. If you're starting from square one, like myself, try another book, possibly Murach's. I'll also be avoiding books by this author in the future.