COBOL has long been said to be dead. However, there are still tens of millions of COBOL code lines. Especially in banks and insurance companies COBOL programs are still used and it is not foreseeable that these programs will be changed. This book is intended for learning COBOL in the form of self-study or as accompanying material in COBOL courses. It teaches the elementary basics of creating and maintaining programs with COBOL. Emphasis is placed on the basic application of the various techniques and simple examples, and not on completeness of all possible statements, commands or parameters. In particular, no dialect or distribution specific features are considered. This book is designed as a beginner's course, working through the basics of the COBOL language from the ground up. However, COBOL is rarely learned as a first programming language, and elementary, basic programming experience is assumed. COBOL has its main application on mainframes / mainframes. However, one can also work very well with a normal PC. Therefore, only a PC is explicitly assumed as a basis for the book. However, the explanations of the actual program codes are independent of the platform.
