When I was working on Mainframes for few months, I realised that most of the work in the market on Mainframes are maintenance based. Using COBOL, CICS and DB2, we had to follow the Clients instructions for embedding the changes in the already written thousand lines of program. Thanks to COBOL, a Business Process Language, which is quite easy to learn as it contains statements that are very close to English Language statements and so any novice can easily understand what a given COBOL statement is trying to do. With very little extra effort required, COBOL can be mastered with ease. What was tough in that project was learning and using JCL, the Job Control Language. If one is thorough with COBOL and JCL, he has already gone way ahead to be an expert of Mainframes. As I already said, most of the work are maintenance ones, so working on Mainframes is not so difficult. Only problem an expert faces is the uninteresting screen which is not so fabricated like the ones in open-systems. The screen on which you have to work is boring and gives rise to a monotonous feeling.
In COBOL, there are statements like "PERFORM para1" , "ADD this TO that",etc. and any educated person can easily interpret the meaning of this. One thing that a programmer needs to take care here are the column numbers. There are a total of 80 columns out of which there is separate column numbers dedicated to comments and those for programming. The paragraphs will begin from a specific column number and the statements from a different one.
All the variables and constants to be ever used in the COBOL program should be defined before the start of the actual program, under its DIVISION. The variable length should be mentioned along with its type whether string/numeric , array/single and the optional value can also be mentioned at this stage itself.
Compilation of COBOL program takes certain amount of time owing to the large programs written. Using the JCL, you can execute the COBOL programs. JCL is used to control and execute a batch of jobs and if you are good at writing JCL, you are a genious.
Thus finding a way into the Mainframes work is simple and easy but to stay ahead of average crowd, you will really have to put in your efforts in learning a bit more about the language and specially about the execution using your own JCL script.
I have posted this information for those people who have just come out of college and would need some guidance in deciding about career in Mainframes.
In COBOL, there are statements like "PERFORM para1" , "ADD this TO that",etc. and any educated person can easily interpret the meaning of this. One thing that a programmer needs to take care here are the column numbers. There are a total of 80 columns out of which there is separate column numbers dedicated to comments and those for programming. The paragraphs will begin from a specific column number and the statements from a different one.
All the variables and constants to be ever used in the COBOL program should be defined before the start of the actual program, under its DIVISION. The variable length should be mentioned along with its type whether string/numeric , array/single and the optional value can also be mentioned at this stage itself.
Compilation of COBOL program takes certain amount of time owing to the large programs written. Using the JCL, you can execute the COBOL programs. JCL is used to control and execute a batch of jobs and if you are good at writing JCL, you are a genious.
Thus finding a way into the Mainframes work is simple and easy but to stay ahead of average crowd, you will really have to put in your efforts in learning a bit more about the language and specially about the execution using your own JCL script.
I have posted this information for those people who have just come out of college and would need some guidance in deciding about career in Mainframes.
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