Reengineering Cobol With Objects: Step by Step to Sustainable Legacy Systems (Object Technology Series) (Hardcover)

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Editorial Reviews

Product Description

Using COBOL as the programming language, this book explains how to change legacy systems into modern flexible platforms for growth and development. The computer departments of large organizations spend most of their time maintaining older systems. Most of these systems are written in COBOL. This book provides a step by step approach for eliminating the maintenance backlog by using the techniques of object oriented design. The first sections show how older methods of writing COBOL programs lead to logic that clogs programs with complexity and chokes off further development. By using objects, the book describes a complete methodology for taking these older systems and rebuilding them. In the process, the programmer gradually removes the older logic and replaces it with object oriented code. The result is systems that are adaptable to new technologies in COBOL, even though it is not an object oriented language. Along with an explanation of objects, the book presents a complete methodology for changing older systems with the new techniques.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 257 pages
• Publisher: Mcgraw-Hill (Tx) (January 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 007037774X
• ISBN-13: 978-0070377745
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #2,356,283 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A COBOL BOOK FOR ALL SEASONS, May 19, 2000

By	Harold Gower (Livermore, California) - See all my reviews

This book is the ultimate end to the evolution of COBOL from spaghetti code to structured programming to legacy systems. Robert Levey discusses how most legacy systems probably started out as well structured code and, over several years of maintenance, evolved into structured linguine (my metaphor).

He then offers a solution of reengineering with objects. This book is a must for all COBOL programmers and analysts both young and old (green and seasoned)

0 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Book needs a major rewrite, February 14, 2006

By	John Croucher "croucher_john" (Athens, OH USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I found this book to be dry and poorly laid out. Examples were often mentioned on one page, but shown on the next. This resulted in having to flip pages back and forth to view code snippets while reading about them. The book is too light on example source code and does not contain any complete programs. The ideas presented by the author are a broad overview. After reading this book, I have no idea about how to really start implementing them.
If you are wanting an overview of objects and how they relate to COBOL, read this book. If you are looking for a Step by Step to Sustainable Legacy Systems, then this is not the book for you.

In addition the book mentions the author, Robert Levey, is president of Prospect Systems in Nutley, NJ. However, using Google, I could not find a web site (or any information for that matter) for this company.