Review: Mastering COBOL by Carol Baroudi
Carol Baroudi, author of The Internet for Dummies, has recently pulled together one of the most complete COBOL references you are going to find. This 900+ page book involved 17 contributors, 4 technical editors, and numerous publishing staff. Those involved almost constitute a "Who's Who" in COBOL - for example, Jerome Garfunkel sets the tone with an entertaining foreword. If it's connected with COBOL it's probably in here!
The first part of the book provides a COBOL language reference with clear descriptions of all the standard COBOL syntax; it avoids the lists of rules that most language references impose on us. You may want the book for this section alone! Other sections cover programming with CICS, IMS, and SQL, using JCL, working with legacy programs, coping with the year 2000, what the Euro is about, communicating with other languages, understanding data representations, moving to 64-bit processors, what's coming in the next COBOL standard, and GUI programming.
You are unlikely to read this book from cover to cover, but every section we've dipped into is well written and informative. It's highly likely that there is one section that will more than justify the purchase to you and, over time, you'll be extracting more useful information from the other sections.
The one negative comment we have about the book is that we've found a few typos or formatting problems in technical expressions (for example, a misplaced superscript font changed ((2**n) - 1) to (2**(n-1))). This is hardly surprising in a book of such scope - so if something doesn't seem right to you, check it! Carol is setting up a web site to support the book, so it might be worth checking there for errata (go to http://www.baroudi.com).
To conclude, we should say that we're slightly biased because Fujitsu COBOL is the free compiler that was chosen to go with Mastering COBOL but we won't make money from your book purchase! We think that if you're interested in COBOL you really should check out this book, and we congratulate Carol Baroudi on coordinating and pulling together such an all-embracing reference.
Details:
Mastering COBOL by Carol Baroudi
Published by: Sybex
Sybex web site: http://www.sybex.com
Retail price: $49.99 (USA), Amazon.com price: $39.99 (USA) + shipping
ISBN: 0-7821-2321-X
