Anyone know a good place to learn it? There's a local company which loves hiring IT students fresh out of college, especially my college, as it's the closest to them. The only issue is that they use COBOL for all their programming needs, but the college doesn't offer a class on it.
Might help if you told us where you are located, what college you attend, how far you are willing to travel to take the courses, and how much you are willing to spend for them.
I just did some research at 5 of the top programming forums available online and none of them seem to support COBOL. In fact one post I found was a guy similar to you simply inquiring about why everyone seems to hate COBOL and the mods closed the thread saying it was not a suitable question for their forum. WOW!
This suggests to me that you are going to be largely on your own to learn COBOL and that's fine if you are a self-starter and able to learn on your own. That's me, a self-taught programmer and I believe most programmers need to be of the self-taught type because programming is all about logical thinking and constant learning. You have to be capable of solving problems in a creative fashion.
My advice, do some research to find the best books on COBOL and buy 3 of them. This technique has always worked for me. Three books by 3 different authors will enable you to learn the language if you have what it takes naturally... Good reading comprehension and good logical thinking abilities.
Review each book quickly and then choose your favorite book and read it cover to cover while simultaneously practicing coding on the computer. When you get confused or need more explanations on a particular topic, you have 2 other books to use as a reference. Usually by getting 2 other author's explanations on particular issue it will finally click in.
Then do some research to find someone online you can chat with about COBOL. There has to be someone. Maybe talk to that company you are interested in and ask their advise or guidance. Be creative and prove to yourself that you have problem solving skills by finding the needed COBOL resources.
Start programming ASAP and don't get too bogged down in all the exercises of the books. Do something practical and useful with your code.
One thing amuses me, column numbers mean something in COBOL. If you write a particular statement starting at the wrong column, then it is a syntax error. At least that's how I remember it to be. Somewhere along the line you will encounter JCL ( job control language, I think) and maybe MVS ( an OS ). Wikipedia provides a good read for introduction.
Before spending a lot of time learning an obsolete and distasteful programming language such as COBOL, I think I'd do some research on the company that uses it. It could be a sign that Management is too rigid in their thinking. I'd want to know how the employees feel about the company in general and how they are treated.
I'm guessing the company understands that getting experience COBOL people is a problem and they have training available at work. You will learn more (applicable programming) in the 'work training' in a month than 2 semester in a college setting or self teaching in 3 months.
I would take Petef56 advise and try and understand why the company hasn't moved on from COBOL. Learning COBOL isn't likely to make you a more marketable professional.
I was 23 when I learned COBOL. I found it to be a simple language to learn, having come from Autocoder and a Burroughs environment. You might gather I'm not a youngster now, but at that time, I found COBOL and later PL/I were easy to learn and could be powerful.
I've maintained a bunch of COBOL over the years and spent way too much time altering it for the Y2K non event. I don't have a problem with it but still stand by my...
Cobol is still heavily used in the Financial sectors from what a few of my friends have told me. We still use it on our mainframe (z/os). We also still use PL1. Both work pretty well for data processing large data sets.
Heck even Assembler and Fortran are still actively being used.
My first book on Cobol was 'Teach Yourself Computer Programming in COBOL' by Melinda Fisher, Hodder and Stoughton, 1983!
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