Both of these books are handbooks for users of the popular IBM AS/400 family of computers. While these are trade user manuals rather than scholarly monographs, they are of some interest because the AS/400 is not only the world’s most popular mid-range system, with some 150,000 machines in daily use, it is also architecturally interesting, being the leading object-oriented hardware architecture on the market. The AS/400 is IBM’s smallest mainframe, but it represents a much larger architecture than the ES 9000.

The AS/400 is the culmination of a long-term IBM General Systems Division strategy to offer departmental or small business computers that did not need the support of professional programmers. This effort began with the System/3, which led to the System/32, /34, and /36, extending to the first object-oriented architecture, the System/38, in the late 1970s. The current AS/400 family is the technological successor to the System/38. IBM’s strategy to make computing power accessible to small businesses without programmers has been successful to a degree. The System/3 offered RPG, a report generator that has been superseded by RPG II on the /3x series and RPG III on the AS/400; the AS/400 will also compile and run COBOL programs, as well as programs in most other high-level languages.

Lawrence’s book is a well-written overview of the AS/400 architecture as an object-oriented database machine. The author employs a minimum of technical jargon and makes this interesting technology accessible to the business end users the designers had in mind when they laid down their “computing for the masses” strategy. I recommend the book highly to the reader who wants a 295-page overview, the first 220 pages of which are almost completely free of IBM’s idiosyncratic nomenclature. The book has 19 chapters and eight appendices.

If Lawrence tells the reader what the AS/400 is, Zeilenga and Lenczycki tell the reader how to use it. The book is essentially a programmer’s manual written in a primer-like style to aid the novice user with examples of commands and procedures. It is well written, and the flow of the material is well motivated. Anyone who can read the manual and take pictures with a six-mode camera that has a liquid crystal panel display should be able to read this book and get an AS/400 program to run. The scale and complexity of an AS/400 are both greater than that of a Nikon 4S camera (which has only three microprocessors connected by a four-bit bus), but the information transfer process to the user is quite similar. The book has five chapters: “Operations Procedures,” “Programming Procedures,” “Query Procedures,” “COBOL Programming,” and “RPG Programming.” The new AS/400 user who finds IBM’s manual intimidating will welcome this book.