Our content has been enhanced with a fourth book focused on testing. In partnership with the Open Mainframe Project's COBOL-Check, we have added hands-on labs involving unit tests.

Course #2 - Learning COBOL was also enhanced to include facts on the use of COBOL today as determined by the Open Mainframe Project's COBOL Working Group Survey - #300

This is the third major release of the Open Mainframe Project's COBOL Programming Course. Please see the course PDFs below.

Highlights:
#272 reorganizes the content into three courses: Getting Started, Learning COBOL, and Advanced Topics. This allows learners who already have Zowe and their VS Code environment set up to jump right into course 2 - Learning COBOL.
#287 updates the content to leverage Zowe Version 2, which includes making use of Zowe team configuration to simplify the getting started experience
#267 corrects the PERFORM VARYING AFTER example
#274, #276, #279 add syntax highlighting for code snippets and enhance code readability
#277, #278 improve code used in labs
#280 adds error handling to code used in Debugging challenge
#281 adds a step to verify that the Db2 table is properly loaded with data in the COBOL API Lab of the Advanced Topics Course
#283 adds SQL error handling to the programs used in the COBOL API Lab
#284 corrects binary range images used in the Advanced Topics Course

COBOL Programming Course - Getting Started

#233 & #246 update course images
#227 adds a chapter on table handling
#238 adds a chapter on ABEND handling
#231 adds a section on how to compile COBOL programs on z/OS using JCL in the Basic COBOL chapter
#240 adds a section on using copybooks in the Program Structure chapter
#214 updates all documentation links to the IBM Knowledge Center to reference Enterprise COBOL v6.3 and z/OS 2.4
#205 replaces STOP RUN with GOBACK so that programs will terminate more gracefully
#213 corrects the PERFORM WITH TEST AFTER UNTIL example in the course
#228 corrects examples on conditional names
#218 adds description for an elementary item
#203 renames CBL0033J to CBL0003J
#250 provides various minor edits to improve the course
#232 fixes broken links
#254 updates line number references

COBOL Programming Course - Advanced Topics

#243 adds a chapter on COBOL program compilation
#234 adds a chapter on program tuning and simplification
#235 adds a chapter on multithreading
#215 describes two new features of Enterprise COBOL v6.3 – Dynamic-Length Items & UTF-8 Data
#232 & #251 fix broken links

COBOL Programming Course - Getting Started

#186 clarifies course content to ensure learners understand which username to use in the exercises
#187 and #188 provide minor changes to address issues raised by the community

COBOL Programming Course - Advanced Topics

#178 adds Numerical Data Representation chapter

COBOL Programming Course - Getting Started

#174 updates Code4z content
#166 and #170 add comments to COBOL programs and update screenshots

COBOL Programming Course - Advanced Topics -> Initial Release

#177 adds content on Enterprise COBOL APIs
#164 adds COBOL Challenge - Hacker News Rankings for Mainframe/COBOL Posts
#150 adds COBOL Challenge - The Unemployment Claims
#148 adds COBOL Challenge - The COVID-19 Reports
#138 & #139 add COBOL Challenge - Debugging

Please find the course PDF below. The following changes were made since the 2.0.0 release of the Open Mainframe Project's COBOL Programming Course:

• #140 & #159 add comments to COBOL programs and update the screenshots
• #154 fixes issue #21 where the source code for a lab was not in the desired initial state

This is the second release of the Open Mainframe Project's COBOL Programming Course. Please find the course PDF below. The following changes were made since the initial release:

• #133 separates the content into multiple books setting the path for further extensibility of the project
• #120 adds Code4z as an option for the labs
• #115 restructures VS Code chapters
• #132, #134 adds code comments to COBOL programs
• #128 removes unwanted spaces
• #114 fixes formatting

This is the initial release of the Open Mainframe Project's COBOL Programming Course. Please find the course PDF below.