IPCS being the Good tool for getting fast results, is no substitute for Know how .. Also you might mentions that GTF traces are another avenue for the aspiring programmer to hone their skills. It unfortunate that many companies have become "Gun Shy " of people with assembler coding skills (good was to get your resume tossed in the round file I'd say). Anything that'll help get you going in the right direction is worthwhile investing or investigating. Share has always delivered good tutorial on Assembly Language programming.
There are no short cuts or magic bullets .. role up sleeves put on pot of coffee... MVS (JCL is unforgiving) is gonna keep you up on some long nights until you learn the basics rules ,traps and pitfalls. I surely don't know them all. Good luck Soldier -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Assembler List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Tom Marchant Sent: Monday, July 29, 2013 11:43 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: 3 job openings for mainframe Assembler/C programmers, dump readers On Thu, 25 Jul 2013 23:59:49 -0500, William H. Blair wrote: >Don V Nielsen asks: > >| Where might one one find good instruction on how to read a dump? > >For the most part, everybody I know that's any good at it got that way >all on their own (they may have taken a class from IBM or Amdahl back >when they were young and green, however...) When I was getting started as a Cobol programmer in 1970, I was given a paper with a title something like "Newspaper approach to dump reading". It was based upon a journalist's basic questions, who, what, when, where, why and how, that are necessary in any investigation. That document helped me get started reading SYSABEND dumps of my simple programs. I have no idea where it came from, but I wonder if it might have come from SHARE. Then, as an Amdahl SE, I attended classes in MVS internals and diagnosis. During my years there, I must have analyzed hundreds of dumps. Most of them were SVC dumps, but also the occasional stand-alone dump. In those pre-XA days, the dumps that I examined were all on paper. Today, I use IPCS. I have mentored some to help them with their dump analysis skills. A few have become quite competent at it. -- Tom Marchant
