book recommendations for learning COBOL?

[NTB]

We use it a whole lot on the mainframe at work, so I'd like to learn more about it than the bits and pieces I get occasionally from the mainframe programmers at work

Any suggestions?

Nathan

 

[dighn]

COBOL must have been damn good to survive this long

 

[zerocool1]

i'm sorry that you have to learn cobol. i feel your pain....

 

[SpiderWiz]

Cobol for the 80's is a good book. J Wayne Spence is the author. Maybe he has something newer. I just loved Cobol.

 

[aCynic2]

I]Originally posted by: zerocool1[/i]
i'm sorry that you have to learn cobol. i feel your pain....

Mainframes still run on cobol and mainframes aren't going away anytime soon.

My company wants to do away with its mainframe, but there are applications on it that have no wintel or UNIX server equivalent. Plus there is the reliability factor. The mainframe has crashed maybe three times in the last 3-4 years. Wintel crashes daily, UNIX has problems weekly.

A wintel or UNIX server mmay be cheaper to run, but only when it does what you need it to do, otherwise it's useless.

Still, there may be 100s of servers for every one mainframe, so your marketability is higher with servers. However, wintel and UNIX admins and programmers are a dime a dozen, so your pay is usually higher for mainframe work.

 

[NTB]

Originally posted by: zerocool1
i'm sorry that you have to learn cobol. i feel your pain....

I don't *have* to learn COBOL - it's not something that my manager is requiring of me. But my team at work is basically a reporting team, and a lot of the back-end work for the apps we build (collecting data, doing calculations, etc) are done on the mainframe. If an issue comes up, that's usually the first place we look. So while it's not required, it sure would be useful.

Nathan

 

[NTB]

Originally posted by: dighn
COBOL must have been damn good to survive this long

I think it's more the case that there are apps written in COBOL for which there is no good equivalent on the PC side, and nobody wants to take the time to re-write all that code

Nathan