Customer Reviews

Programming in RPG IV, Second Edition

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

 

 

I am currently entering my 2nd semester using this book! the book itself is excellant and well written, especially for the beginner! But take care of which version you get! The only Dif. is the number on the inside cover, and the color of the printer spacing charts in the exercises, while the good oone has all black charts. The book with 123456KP10987 under the ISBN number on the inside page FALLS APART! (Happened to EVERY classmate who used it!), the BAD version also has blue green colored charts in the chapter exercises. BUT ... IT IS A GREAT BOOK TO LEARN FROM!!

My workgroup purchased this book some time ago. Judy writes excellent, no-nonsense books about RPG programming. We all find this to be a very helpful text. Especially our junior programmers find it useful. For example, she has a whole chapter on structured programming. That's something the senior programmers don't care about (and one therefore doesn't much like the book), but still it's an excellent text. It's usually pretty easy to find what you need in the index, and her examples are easy to follow.

This book was issued to me while I was in school. (Yes, there are school out there that actually teach RPG, CL and other AS/400 concepts) I have read many books on RPG and this one definitely made a difference for me in learning the concepts clearly. For beginners there is really no substitute for this book. Once I got into the workforce and saw the huge amounts of RPG III programs that my company had, I felt a bit dismayed, but Judy has a chapter in the book entitled "Maintaining the Past", and that chapter helped me out so very much. Once again this is a beginner book, but a very good one. I still use it as a reference too. I might add that Robert Cozzi's book is the best for reference information that I have found.

Good learning tool for the beginner, but too much "deja-vu" for the RPG III programmer. Errors in the text of her RPG/400 book are still present in this one: Specification of AND/OR SELECT/OMIT lines in Logical File DDS, and erroneous from/to locations for user ID in Program Status Data Structure.

I was given this book as part of my companies training to be an AS/400 programmer. The concepts in this book were easy to understand in the format that they were layed out, and the section on legacy applications was usefull in the fact that our company has alot of older 36 code that still has to be maintained.

I've used this book as my main reference at work and around 9 times out of 10, it has answered my questions. If I did not find it in the book, certainly IBM's website came to the rescue. However, the book paid for itself after I got the answer to my third question:-)

I would have rated it 4.5 stars because there is a slight room for improvement, but it paid for itself already! While most of the code samples are quite clear, some topics would have been better explained in the context of a small but complete program. The addition of a few COMPLETE program samples e.g. maintenance/subfile/table handling etc. (not code snippets) with annotations would bring the book closer to perfection.

RPG is a tough language to learn however, Ms. Yaeger provides an easy-to-read and understand text with quite a few examples. My class did mix up the first couple of chapters (skipping chap 4) to come back to it after working on chapter 5.

The first class I took in AS/400 used another text that was at least 3 times harder to understand.

This book has got me out of a tight spot by providing vital insights that I needed to get the job done in a hurry. A very practical and useful book for programmers. A Big Thank you to Judy Yaeger.

I purchased this book while in College and attempted to use it several times to program in RPG, however, the lack of extensive examples and the lack of explaination towards older RPG code has caused me to look for something more useful. I had a lot of trouble trying to learn from this book, althought it may be ok as a reference.

I was brought into the IT world through RPG. I was stolen from the business side and thrown into RPG with no schooling or experience. This book got me through the darkest hours of frustration. It is like an old friend. Examples are easy to follow. And, it isn't for people who need a little knowledge in AS/400-speak. It is for people who want to write programs.