mainframes

I first learned COBOL on an HP-3000 about 12-13 years ago. Unfortunately, I didn't use COBOL again until a few months ago, so my COBOL skills were rusty indeed when I found the need to create COBOL programs on the AS/400 I use at work. PROGRAMMING IN COBOL/400 was exactly the refresher I needed.

Although the first few chapters were primarily a review of good programming practice (use of flowcharts, pseudocode and printer spacing charts), the remainder of the book provided a good, reasonably comprehensive discussion of COBOL programming concepts.

The book is organized in a fairly straight-forward manner, starting with a look at the different divisions of a COBOL program. While I have yet to encounter a book that describes the four divisions and their sub-sections in a way that makes it easy for me to remember what is required, and in what order to place them (I tend to copy old programs, remove everything that is not used in the new program, and rewrite the Data and Procedure Divisions), this book's discussion of these constructs is as good as any, and better than many. The author introduces new concepts when discussing the Procedure Division in an effective manner, starting with the basics and gradually building towards more advanced concepts. The index is, for the most part, comprehensive and useable. The appendices at the end of the book cover topics that may be useful to some programmers, without cluttering the main text of the book with material that most AS/400 programmers do not need because they are probably already familiar with it (such as the AS/400 environment, PDM, etc.).

My gripes are mostly trivial, and should not discourage a potential buyer from purchasing this book. First, the overview of programming concepts probably would have been better in an appendix. This is very basic material, and not necessary for most AS/400 programmers to review. Second, since input and output specifications are such a large part of COBOL programming, copies of a printer spacing chart in the appendix would have been nice. The author shows the use of these spacing charts in several examples, but all have sample data filled in on them. Finally, some of the discussion appears a little dated. As I understand, this book is basically a rewrite, geared specifically towards the AS/400, of a "classic" COBOL text. Unless I am mistaken, the original source for this text was the book I used in high school to learn COBOL in the first place, and it is apparent to the reader that much of the content has been adapted to the AS/400 environment.

Nevertheless, this is a very readable text on AS/400 COBOL, and I would recommend it to an AS/400 programmer--or any other programmer, for that matter, as COBOL is a very standardized language--without hesitation.

A fine first book for students and those who want a reference book for COBOL/400. There are numerous errors and some info that is meant for ILE COBOL/400 rather than the COBOL/400 (such as usage of the INITIAL PROGRAM IS clause in the ENVIRONMENT DIVISION...