Overview

Extensive experience

As mentioned in Chapter 1, COBOL programmers normally have extensive experience. Nevertheless, many of them were not lucky enough to spend years studying at a university. In fact, many often received only a brief introduction and had to start on a job and become productive immediately. This is basically nothing bad to the contrary! Productive work is a good thing and cannot be replaced by years of studying at universities. But still, it is about time to catch up on a few things and improve systematic work.

Programming is more than coding!

This chapter deals with the process of learning these things systematically. It is aimed at improving general programming knowledge. Programming is a highly creative activity, and a complex one. In fact, it is probably more complex than many other engineering sciences. In addition, programming should not be seen as a coding task, because it involves much more, including analysis, design, development, testing, and often, commissioning (verifying whether the software solves the problem) at the customer's site.

Software engineering

All this is important and is discussed in this chapter without depending on any single language. Therefore, this chapter does not require knowledge of a specific programming language. We will come to this point in the next chapter, which briefly discusses some of the concepts explained here and then deals with language differences. Notice that we should not be talking about programming in this chapter; software engineering is the better and more comprehensive term.

2.1 Software Engineering...