Customer Reviews

COBOL for OS/390 Power Programming with Complete Year 2000 Section (MVS Training, Inc. Mainframe Series)

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

 

 

This book is for programmers who learned OS/VS COBOL or COBOL II and are now upgrading to COBOL/390. This is IBM's latest version of COBOL, with an emphasis on open systems and object orientation. There are a lot of new features in COBOL/390 and David Shelby Kirk describes them clearly and thoroughly.

The book was written for experienced professionals, not for novices or entry level programmers. The book does not explain basic syntax of statements or other organizational aspects of a COBOL program. I wrote the book for the professional programmer who already knows COBOL and wants to move that skill to a higher level. This includes incorporating the COBOL language with the enterprise server environment for effectiveness and efficiency, and creating extended software architectures.

To my knowledge, there are no other books that focus on the advanced techniques of COBOL in the IBM enterprise environment. This book introduces new techniques for program structure and memory management and explains the major components of optimizing programs within the IBM enterprise environment. If you are developing enterprise applications, this is the book for you. IBM has made major expansions in COBOL in recent years and this book will help you unlock those new features.

David's book is an exceptional COBOL reference for anyone who works with the COBOL language. He gives practical information on how to make your code Year 2000 compliant along with many suggestions for improving the overall code including help with improving a user's programming efficiency.

Feedback from readers indicates he has a knack for answering specific technical questions via the book that a person using the COBOL language asks as a result of their use.

Olivia R. Carmandi, Publisher

This is a GREAT book for people who know COBOL and need to know the differences among the COBOL versions. This book is LOADED with programming tips.

Covers how to improve coding techniques along with the differences in COBOL versions. Great for seasoned programmers too.

For the basics, this is an excellent writeup and you SHOULD have it. What is NOT covered is LE and object programming. Intrinsic functions are slighted but you can figure them out.

The author is very upfront about not covering the object extensions - I can almost forgive him. But these are the future - our top management is very object/web oriented.

I think there is a slide on the LE coverage. After we went through the Y2K conversion, our programs are loaded with language environment calls. Section 3.13 is a listing only of what should have been a great amount of detail on using LE calls and intrinsic functions.

In defense of the author I did find an example of the function used with a date (on page 384) MOVE FUNCTION CURRENT-DATE (1:8) to WS-GREGORIAN which is close to our shop standard MOVE FUNCTION CURRENT-DATE (1:14) TO WS-DATE-TIME.