The authors of this book provide two valuable instructional aids. The first, a Cobol compiler, CA-Realia Classroom Cobol, enables students to use an IBM-compatible PC to run all projects in which each program and subprogram is no more than 500 lines long. Utility programs--a debugger, an editor, a linker, and an indexed file utility--provide necessary tools for students to learn and practice all phases of Cobol system development. The second is a data disk that contains every Cobol program in the text, as well as data files for about eight dozen student projects. The ready availability of such data also helps students learn system maintenance and system redesign.

Appendices A, B, and C provide user-friendly documentation for the included software, along with illustrations using hands-on exercises. A Cobol 85 reference summary is included in Appendix D. The book introduces Cobol 85, and shows the limitations of Cobol-74 at the end of each chapter, so students who have used Cobol-74 can easily move to Cobol 85 and quickly begin using the new features in the Cobol standard. The programming exercises extend across chapters, a device used to develop continuity from one chapter to next.

The first two chapters get students started in learning by doing: writing program specifications, pseudocode, and then Cobol code from the very beginning. Chapter 3 provides a reasonable discussion of the building blocks of structured programming, hierarchy charts, pseudocode, Warnier-Orr diagrams, and top-down testing. Thus, students get a good foundation in structured methodology before they begin doing serious programming. For this reason, I plan to use this text when I conduct Cobol training for beginners as part of my consulting business.

Chapters 4 and 5 introduce the four components of a Cobol program: the identification division, environment division, data division, and procedure division. Chapter 6 introduces students to debugging and structured walkthroughs. Chapters 7 and 8 provide editing and coding standards and data validation concepts in reasonable detail, to prepare students for good software engineering practice. They then revisit the procedure division for more explanation of conditional as well as unconditional PERFORM, string processing, and so on.

The remaining chapters provide instruction on screen I/O, tables, table lookups, multilevel tables, sorting, control breaks, subprograms, sequential file maintenance, and indexed files. This detailed discussion of control breaks; data validation; techniques for table lookups; and initialization, sorting, and organization of indexed files and file maintenance is useful for serious students. A good selection of short-answer questions, Cobol problems, and programming projects is provided at the end of each chapter to reinforce the concepts learned in that chapter.

This is a good textbook for teaching Cobol programming the right way--with a good methodology providing good specifications, system design, testing and validation, and system maintenance.