Re: [open-cobol-list] advanced Cobol books ?

[john Culleton]

On Sat, 10 Aug 2013 14:22:25 -0400 Patrick
<address@hidden> wrote:

> Hi Steve
> 
> Well at least your teaching Cobol, that's the best news I've
> heard all day.
> 
> Learning Cobol has been a very strange experience.
> 
> There is apparently more Cobol code then any other language and
> I have even heard that there is more of it then all other
> languages combined but I bet I can find more code examples on
> the net of coffee script, Vala or groovy.
> 
> In my first few months with Cobol I keep thinking that I have
> to figure out how to blend this language and that language with
> Cobol to make up for the weakness in Cobol but now that I am
> into my 8th or 9th month with it, I am starting to see that
> Cobol already has it.  The trouble is finding the resources to
> learn all the little nuances.
> 
> Do you think that many Cobol shops trained their own people but
> then swore them to secrecy? How can their be a shortage of good
> materials for this language.
> 
> I am also surprised that there is no large failed project that
> has been freed as open source. For instance Blender is an open
> source 3D animation project that has a large following. It
> didn't start this way though, it was freed for a modest amount
> of money after it failed as a commercial product Any how keep
> up the good fight!-Patrick
> 
My generation of programmers learned on the job from studying
code of others and from the IBM Green Book self teaching texts.
The reason that it is not taught in colleges is that the
professors decided years ago that is was not Fortran or Lisp or
Perl or C++ or Java or whatever was the fad at the time and hence
was uncool. I actually had a professor ask me somewhat wistfully
years ago when I was on a recruiting trip, "Do you think we can
ever get rid of COBOL?" 

The demise of COBOL in part became a self-fulfilling prophecy.
If taught at all it was taught badly by professors who learned it
badly from other professors who had never spent a day working in
a COBOL shop.  

Murach and Associates has swum against the tide and their books 
can be consulted.

-- John Culleton Wexford Press Free list of books for
self-publishers: http://wexfordpress.net/shortlist.html PDF
e-book: "Create Book Covers with Scribus" available at
http://www.booklocker.com/books/4055.html