 The Power of COBOL
Title: THE POWER OF COBOL
Author: Rui Bivar de Oliveira
Publisher: BookSurge.com in association with MigrationWare
Publication Date: Mid-August, 2006
Power of COBOL unleashed for 21st century programmers
A looming worldwide shortage of trainers in COBOL, the computer programming language that made its debut in 1959, has inspired South African expert Rui de Oliveira to write a new training book on the Common Business Oriented Language relevant to the corporate IT manager's needs.
The Power of COBOL, being published in the US in August 2006 in association with MigrationWare, will also be available through this site. The new tutorial instructs students – both novices and experienced programmers – in the art and mechanism of computer programming and brings COBOL clearly into the context of 21st century requirements.
De Oliveira, founder of the Luso Computer Institute in Johannesburg and a renown trainer in programming, is one of few people worldwide who can take on the mantle of teaching COBOL.
"COBOL is a not only in wide use in the computer industry today but has shown itself to be an excellent vehicle for teaching the art and science of programming," said De Oliveira.
"Some years ago, attempts were made to "rip and replace" existing COBOL systems by attempting to rewrite or redevelop into other more trendy languages, but by and large these efforts have proved unsuccessful. Instead, the idea of extinction has been replaced with one of extension and inclusion.
"Fourth generation languages had come onto the market but none could match the power of COBOL. The 4th generation languages died a natural death. Instead, the languages to capture the market's fancy would be cryptic languages like C, C++ and more recently Java and the languages in the .Net stable. Nevertheless COBOL has retained a commanding position in spite of the noise made by its competitors against it."
Today COBOL runs more than 70% of the world's production business applications and an estimated 15% of all new applications created through 2006 will be written in COBOL.
De Oliveira believes that COBOL's resilience stems from the fact that being non-cryptic, it is easy to understand and therefore maintain. In addition, it is unequalled when it comes to processing large volumes of data and is also highly dependable and reliable.
The Power of COBOL is a comprehensive tutorial which covers the COBOL language through the '74, '85 and the new 2002 standard, and encompasses procedural, structured programming and object orientation, demonstrating the full spectrum as the language evolved. It is being published by BookSurge, an Amazon.com company and in association with software developers MigrationWare.
This latest COBOL standard includes:
- New binary data types corresponding to data types present in PC languages and introduced by the 2002 standard
- Bitwise operations
- Reference modification
- Intrinsic functions
- Programmer created functions
- Program calling, by reference, by value and by content
- Understanding Object Orientation with introduction to OO tools and class diagrams
- Encapsulation, inheritance and polymorphism
- Factory, Super and Self
- Properties
- Interfaces
- Collections
- Introduction to relational databases including data normalization
- Reading from and updating databases
Click here to order a copy.
For additional information please e-mail jeanne@migrationware.com.
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