From the course: COBOL Essential Training

Are you ready to get started? - COBOL Tutorial

From the course: COBOL Essential Training

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Are you ready to get started?

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- [Narrator] Before we get started, there are some things you should already know about programming in general. This course is designed to provide you with examples of COBOL programs that you might see in a production environment. Since most programmers will not be creating new COBOL programs, I took the approach of introducing COBOL commands and concepts by demonstration. I want to stress that this is not intended to be an introduction to the foundations or fundamentals of programming. You should already be familiar with basic principles of programming such as defining variables, assigning data types and using assignment statements. A major difference with COBOL is the fact that it's strictly a procedural language. Therefore, my intent is to show how COBOL can be used to accomplish similar tasks that can be found in other more recent object oriented programming languages. In this course, we will learn about reading and writing the files, including data validation, which is often the purpose of a COBOL program. I will review Syntax for creating variables and writing statements to perform calculations. Although COBOL is mainly used on the mainframe computer, there is an option available that allows us to simulate that environment on a personal computer. If you plan to use a personal computer for your COBOL programming, and you want to use GnuCOBOL, which was formerly open COBOL, which is a free COBOL compiler I've included movies that walk you through a sample installation. For this course, I'm going to be using a windows machine. So I will start by installing WSL. WSL stands for Windows Subsystem for Linux, and I'm going to use the Linux installation Debian to set up my environment. Next I will use Visual Studio Code as my code editor, which comes with a WSL extension in additional COBOL extensions for code formatting. So the good news is that you don't need access to a mainframe computer to complete this course, but you will have to install some type of COBOL compiler. For this course I chose GnuCOBOL.

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