COBOL has been the mainstay of business applications for over 40 years and the significant existing code base, as well as continued new development, are indications that COBOL will be a significant business-application development language for years to come. This course is intended to provide the foundation that many new and experienced developers are lacking in their academic and professional background with respect to COBOL.

 Course Description

This course provides an introduction to application development using COBOL. Topics addressed include the overall program structure, the major COBOL reserved words and the corresponding statement syntax, and an introduction to such common situations as table processing and transaction file processing. Examples are provided throughout and paper-based exercises are liberally interspersed to familiarize the students with the terms, syntax and usage of the COBOL statements. The opportunity is provided for the students to write their own COBOL programs as soon as the material has been covered to code an entire program. As the course progresses, the written exercises continue to focus on material that has been recently introduced, while additional complexity is added to the coding exercises. Throughout the course, there is a heavy emphasis on a structured approach to program development. The course concludes with a discussion of testing considerations, techniques and debugging.

 Objectives

Upon completion of this course, students should be proficient in developing simple to moderately complex COBOL applications.

 Audience

This course is intended for those who have little or no experience with COBOL, and who may or may not have programming experience in another language.

Prerequisites

None.