On 6/3/2011 8:35 AM, R.S. wrote:
W dniu 2011-06-03 14:02, Steve Comstock pisze:
[...]
It does get harder in the face of no requests to teach,
however. I have written over a dozen courses that have
never been taught, and it is, as you note, hard to get
the impetus to keep them current. But I do. That's the
job. And that's why we make the big bucks. :-)
Oh, so you are *also* very rich man, earned fortune on teaching mainframe
courses?
;-)))
Oh yeah.
More seriously: in many cases outdated material is quite valuable, because vast
majority of courses (and students intentions) it to learn the technology, not to
learn "what's new".
May be "valuable" but management won't pay for the value
if they can get it for free.
Back to example of z990 what are the most important features
which are present in z10, but not present in z990? For beginner
- nothing IMHO.
Well, of course, after the z990 there were:
z9, z10, z196
z9 came out in 2005, which is around z/OS 1.7 timeframe;
so for the beginner, if they study z990 and OS/390 (which
is what the free materials from IBM seem to cover), what
will be missed that would be especially useful / helpful?
It depends, of course, if the student is heading towards
systems support or application development. My focus is
always on the application developer. So here's what some
cursory research turns up ('<==' indicates a feature I
think would be beneficial even for a newbie to know):
TSO/ISPF:
* SWAPBAR <==
* UDLIST
* AK, BK, OK line commands <==
* HX line command <==
COBOL:
* Underscore in data item names <==
* Support for XML PARSE with validate using schema <==
Assembler:
* 64-bit stuff; now the z990 is a 64-bit machine,
but OS/390 is not a 64-bit operating system, so
I don't know what the materials under discussion
cover in this realm; but from z9 on:
* Extended-Immediate Facility <==
* ETF2-Enhancement Facility
* EFT3-Enhancement Facility
* Decimal Floating Point Facility
* Decimal Floating Point Rounding Facility
* Distinct Operands Facility <==
* Execut Extensions Facility <==
* Floating Point Support Sign Handling Facility
* FPR-GR Transfer Facility
* General Instructions Extension Facility <==
* High Word Facility <==
* Interlocked Access Facility <==
* Load / Store on condition Facility <==
* Parsing Enhancement Facility <==
* Population Count Facility
there are others, but these would impact application coders;
OK, I'll concede few applications are coded in Assembler
today, and the newbie is not likely to be ready for this stuff
General z/OS 1.5 and later:
* Support for large format files
* Extended Address Volumes <==
Of course, this is just cursory, so I probably missed a few,
and others will have different lists. But there is value, I
believe, even for new applications developers, in learning
the current versions right from the start. After all, lots
of long time programmers don't know the new stuff and they
could use some catching up. But management always seems to
think "My people know that already". Well they don't, but
it's a hard case to make.
--
Kind regards,
-Steve Comstock
The Trainer's Friend, Inc.
303-393-8716
http://www.trainersfriend.com
* To get a good Return on your Investment, first make an investment!
+ Training your people is an excellent investment
* Try our new tool for calculating your Return On Investment
for training dollars at
http://www.trainersfriend.com/ROI/roi.html
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