James, It's impossible these days to know whether or not the usual associations apply. COBOL *IS* mainframe. Other COBOLs are derived from "mainframe" COBOL. In other words in days gone by, let's say 30 years ago to be safe, you wouldn't have asked for "mainframe" COBOL but you might have asked for IBM COBOL or Burroughs COBOL or <any of the other six dwarfs> COBOL.
The purpose of bringing this up is to hint that any dusty old book that says it teaches you COBOL will probably be describing "mainframe" COBOL and may be very good. In any case, given that it's a supposed objective of high-level languages that they are independent of their platform, any tutorial book *should* suffice for the basics. I say all this having only ever written a few sample COBOL programs to try out IBM's OSI products many years ago. I have a low boredom threshold.<g> I did try "cobol tutorial online" in Google and found http://www.programmingtutorials.com/cobol.aspx . You might find some useful material here costing only the power to drive your PC while you browse it. Chris Mason ----- Original Message ----- From: "Huckert, James" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main To: <[email protected]> Sent: Monday, 05 June, 2006 2:10 PM Subject: COBOL Books > Anyone out there know of any good mainframe COBOL books for beginners. > Thanks James H. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
