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Teach Yourself Cobol in 21 Days (Sams Teach Yourself...)

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I've been recommending this book to my clients for over a year now. "COBOL in 21 days" Has provided a solid foundation for both new programmers and those that are transitioning from current languages to legacy systems.

The authors approach is to lay down the fundamental structure of the language, then give you a series of "hands on" excercises that perform most of the functions that you find in a business environment. You become "COBOL competent" very quickly.

One of the great things about the code that you learn is that it adheres to excellent programming standards. The examples are structured and tend to be much better quality then the code that I usually run into at my client sites.

There is a Year 2000 specific section that provides some great "real world" help. I was able to use some of these tips in a Y2K course that I wrote for Learning Tree International.

Not only do I recommend this book for beginner programmers, but it is also a great resource for COBOL pros who can some of the many "canned" routines that are detailed in the book.

This book teaches you ANSI 74 unstructured COBOL. ANSI 85 COBOL (which is now 13 years old) is mentioned but not used in coding examples. The ANSI 89 addition to the standard (instrinsic functions) is not covered at all. Modularity and encapsulation can be done quite well even in '74 COBOL but the reader is completely uneducated after finishing this book. And the reader would never guess that most modern COBOL compilers (including new IBM mainframes) support complete object orientation and that it is fully included in the forthcoming ANSI standard. If you want to maintain old code on IBM mainframes, this book will get you by. Otherwise, even the most diligent reader would be unfit to code at every COBOL installation I have ever seen.

I majored in C.S. in the 80's but never took COBOL. While the book doesn't cover any advanced topics, it provides a solid foundation of COBOL knowledge. An experienced programmer with no knowledge of COBOL should be able to make it through this book in about two weeks (there are actually 7 bonus days on top of the 21 primary lessons). If you know who Bjarn Stroustrup is, this book is probably not for you. If you want an introduction to programming, or know some programming and want to learn COBOL fundamentals, this is a pretty good buy. I bought this book last spring ('98) and now work in a COBOL shop.

This programming book is not quite Structured that is confusing the readers, even to experienced COBOL programmers.

For example, in the first chapter page 19, in the PROCEDURE DIVISION, there should have been only one command statement 'STOP RUN.' in a single line. The author gave 2 extra lines as 'PROGRAM-BEGIN.' and 'PROGRAM-DONE.' as 2 extra modules or Subs (VB) or Functions(C) in other programming languages. Throughout the book, the unstructured programming style carried on since the first program, the 'Hello program' page 15.

Anyhow, the writer says that 'the GO TO approach should be avoided completely' is very good comment for structured programming style. On the contrary the writer uses the EXIT command which usually goes with the GO TO command. In general EXIT style is not structured at all. The same comment should have been applied to the PERFROM THROUGH approach, that is missing in the book.

There is EVALUATE method missing in the book, that is useful to structured programming that is used as 'CASE' in C and VB programming. Without EVALUATE, programmer should use nested IF instead that treats all the cases un-equally and confusingly.

If you want to learn from this book, please, remember to delete the 2 lines 'PROGRAM-BEGIN.' and 'PROGRAM-DONE.' and make sure that the 'STOP RUN' command should be at the end of the first block underneath the line PROCEDURE DIVISION.