Textbook

COBOL for the 21st Century, 11th Edition

Nancy B. Stern, Robert A. Stern, James P. Ley

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The COBOL programming language has remained viable year after year. Today, COBOL is running a large number of the world's business data applications, and it's likely to remain a viable language in the years ahead.

Now in its 11th Edition, Nancy Stern, Robert Stern, and James Ley's COBOL for the 21st Century continues to show how to design COBOL programs that are easy to read, debug, modify, and maintain. You'll learn to write interactive programs as well as batch programs with sophisticated file processing techniques, and become familiar with valuable information processing and systems concepts.

Table of Contents

Unit I: The Basics.

1. An Introduction to Structured Program Design in COBOL.

2. The IDENTIFICATION and ENVIRONMENT DIVISIONS.

3. The DATA DIVISION.

4. Coding Complete COBOL Programs: The PROCEDURE DIVISION.

Unit II: Designing Structured Programs.

5. Designing and Debugging Batch and Interactive COBOL Programs.

6. Moving Data, Printing Information, and Displaying Output Interactively.

7. Computing in COBOL: The Arithmetic Verbs and Intrinsic Functions.

8. Decision Making Using the IF and EVALUATE Statements.

9. Iteration: Beyond the Basic PERFORM.

Unit III: Writing High-Level COBOL Programs.

10. Control Break Processing.

11. Data Validation.

12. Array Processing and Table Handling.

Unit IV: File Maintenance.

13. Sequential File Processing.

14. Sorting and Merging.

15. Indexed and Relative File Processing.

Unit V: Advanced Topics.

16. Improving Program Performance Using the COPY, CALL, and Other Statements.

17. The Report Writer Module.

Appendixes.

A: COBOL Character Set and reserved Words.

B: Differences Among the COBOL Standards.

C: Glossary.

Index.

Author Information

Dr. Nancy Stern received a B.A. in mathematics from Barnard College and an M.S. in mathematics and computer science from New York University. She earned an M.A. and a Ph.D. in the history of science and technology from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Her Ph.D. thesis on the development of Eckert-Mauchly computers has been published by the Digital Equipment Corporation. Her research on the history of electronic digital computers has been supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation.

Dr. Stern has co-authored numerous textbooks in the computing field, including Computing in the Information Age, Structured COBOL Programming, Assembler Language Programming, Structured Flowcharting, System Analysis, Structured RPG III Programming, Turbo Basic, Microsoft Basic and The Impact of Computers on Society. She has also written many articles for ACM Computing Surveys, Datamation, Computerworld, the Annals of the History of Computing, The IEEE Spectrum, Technology and Culture and The Social Studies of Science, as well as a book on the history of computing called From ENIAC to UNIVAC. Her books have been translated into Spanish, Arabic, Portuguese, Korean and Chinese.

New To This Edition

Updated to reflect COBOL 2008, where appropriate
A new chapter on the Report Writer Module
More end-of-chapter questions

Hallmark Features

Integrated coverage of interactive programming
Covers information processing and systems concepts that will help you interact with users and systems analysts when designing programs
Introduces programming tools such as pseudocode and hierarchy charts that make program logic more structured, modular, and top-down
Presents useful techniques for maintaining and modifying older "legacy" programs
Effective learning tools, including chapter outlines and objectives, debugging tips and exercises, critical thinking questions, and programming assignments
A running case study builds on what you have learned in each chapter
Links to COBOL Internet resources