Beginning COBOL for Programmers

Beginning COBOL for Programmers is a comprehensive, sophisticated tutorial and modular skills reference on the COBOL programming language for established programmers. This book is for you if you are a developer who would like to - or must - add COBOL to your repertoire. Perhaps you recognize the opportunities presented by the current COBOL skills crisis, or you may be working in a mission critical enterprise which retains legacy COBOL applications. Whatever your situation, Beginning COBOL for Programmers meets your needs as an established programmer moving to COBOL. Beginning COBOL for Programmers includes coverage of the latest COBOL features and techniques, including control structures, tabular data, sequential files, procedure divisions, string handling, decimal arithmetic, report writer, object-oriented COBOL, and more. You'll receive extensive introductions to the core features of the COBOL language, and then find solutions about how to effectively deploy COBOL to build robust mission critical enterprise applications that talk to legacy enterprise applications or aspects of those applications. If you've inherited some legacy COBOL, you'll be able to grasp the COBOL idioms and recognize what's happening in the code you're working with. The death of COBOL has been predicted time and time again, yet COBOL still remains a dominant force at the heart of enterprise computing. In 1997, the Gartner group estimated that of the 300 billion lines of code in the world, 240 billion (80%) were written in COBOL, and that dominance is not greatly changed today. But there is a crisis on the horizon. While the number of COBOL programmers reaching retirement age has created a growing shortage, attempts to rewrite COBOL legacy systems in a more fashionable language have often not been successful or put aside for a number of reasons. Therefore, today's enterprise application developers - mostly skilled at C++, C# and Java - can find COBOL skills open new - or old - doors, and this handy reliable reference is a book that you can turn to for your COBOL skills. This book is for established programmers looking for a COBOL tutorial and modular skills reference in one handy book. Whether you have inherited some legacy COBOL and need to maintain it, or you have a fresh COBOL project in front of you, the tutorial and skills reference will help you succeed in COBOL.