lvc@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu (Lawrence V. Cipriani) (05/08/88)
A friend of mine wants to learn Cobol. He is a good programmer and could pick the language up from a book (he learned C from K&R with a little bit of help from me). Every book he hAf seen so far starts off by explaining what a computer is ... So the $64,000 question is: Are there any Cobol texts that are NOT written for programming novices? Thanks a lot,
gph@hpsemc.HP.COM (G. Paul Houtz) (05/18/88)
>Every book he hAf seen >so far starts off by explaining what a computer is ... >So the $64,000 question is: Are there any Cobol texts that are >NOT written for programming novices? Thanks a lot, I consider myself to be an experienced COBOL programmer. I might suggest that your friend look at what it is he really wants from a COBOL text. In my opinion, the most important part of any language manual (and the part most often missing) is examples. The best text I have seen for the number of examples is Grauer and Crawford's COBOL A Pragmatic Approach I don't want to flame your friend, but does it really matter if the first two chapters explain computers and data processing? Is it all that hard to simply skip them? This book has so many clear examples that you can (and I did for 2 years) program by simply copying portions of the examples into your program(especially on table-handling, which is not clear or easy in COBOL). Also, the section on IBM punch cards and JCL (which may be gone from more recent editions) is interesting history of COBOL and data processing. (to each his own, I guess) Hope this helps!