Rating:  - This book is not for programmers who want to study COBOL after working with object-oriented languages.
I get this book at work like main manual for all our mainframe COBOL programmers. All the mainframe COBOL people in our shop are old-timers with more then 15 years experience. This book for them is like a bible. I'm object-oriented programmer working with G4 languages almost 14 years. This book for me was like 15 years ago. So I bought for my self new-days COBOL books and was able to study this language. I keep this COBOL book on my desk in case I have to communicate with current mainframe programmers. It helps me to understand what they want and explain to them various programming situations.
Rating: - Well designed book
COBOL, indeed it is still very widely used today and it is here to stay for a good while, especially with COBOL 2008 coming up.
If you have no knowledge in COBOL whatsoever, this book will be your starting point.
The thing I like about this book is how they give the many variations of how you can use a certain piece of code, like the many variations of using the EVALUATE statement.
The authors is not boring. He's straight to the point and tells you on many occasions what types of mistakes to avoid because we all know how long COBOL programs can be to debug.
There is always a different example in each chapter and as the author is adding to the example, the full program is given with sample outputs and the code is available from the CD for you to also test.
On top of that, it has colors and gridlines when needed so COBOL code is quite readable.
Rating:  - got what I ordered
I got what I ordered on time a the specified price.
Rating:  - One of the worst programming books for beginners!
As the reader below me already said, this book is simply too technical. It assumes you know something about this language. Clearly not for beginners. As you can notice, most of the people who gave this book a positive rating are either professors or experienced programmers. None of them was a beginner when they bought the book.
Anyway, I had to pick this book up for one of my college classes. The first source code example is 21 lines long (no comments). I repeat: 21 LINES. A first-program length not normally found on introductory books. And I have read a lot of introductory programming books (C++, Visual Basic, C, etc). Most of them start with the classic "Hello World" program or something similar. But that's not the case in this book.
Over the next three pages the book tries to explain that first example, but, in my opinion, fails miserably. Lots of symbols are left unexplained; lines are mentioned, but their purpose is left a mystery.
The second sample program in chapter one is a 48 lines one. This one is only 6 pages away from the 21-liner. O_o
Then comes the inadequate explanation... followed by the end of chapter programming assignments.
So I wanted to practice a little bit. Hoping to find some other sample programs to clear my confusion, I pop the included CD in my DVD-RW drive, go to My Computer and double click on the CD icon. Well to make a long story short the CD includes only code programs from Chapter 4 and up (This book has 17 chapters). Thus skipping all the introductory chapters. Oh well....
It's good that I have a good professor, because the book is useless.
So my advice is: Do not buy this book if you know nothing about COBOL.
Rating:  - Absolutely Horrendous Book
I use this book at my University or rather, it is the book used for the course, but we never once use it. Why might you ask? Because unlike all reviews before that said this book was great, this book is written so technically and to understand it, you have to already know something about Cobol. If you need help with a program and want to look it up in the book hoping it will help you, forget it. There is no way this book is of any help and it is so hard to understand. You are better off buying some other book instead of this one. Trust me.
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