Title Details

Dr. Nancy Stern received a B.A. in mathematics from Barnard College and an M.S. in mathematics and computer science from New York University. She earned an M.A. and a Ph.D. in the history of science and technology from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Her Ph.D. thesis on the development of Eckert-Mauchly computers has been published by the Digital Equipment Corporation. Her research on the history of electronic digital computers has been supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation.

Dr. Stern has co-authored numerous textbooks in the computing field, including Computing in the Information Age, Structured COBOL Programming, Assembler Language Programming, Structured Flowcharting, System Analysis, Structured RPG III Programming, Turbo Basic, Microsoft Basic and The Impact of Computers on Society. She has also written many articles for ACM Computing Surveys, Datamation, Computerworld, the Annals of the History of Computing, The IEEE Spectrum, Technology and Culture and The Social Studies of Science, as well as a book on the history of computing called From ENIAC to UNIVAC. Her books have been translated into Spanish, Arabic, Portuguese, Korean and Chinese.

Unit I: The Basics.

1. An Introduction to Structured Program Design in COBOL.

2. The IDENTIFICATION and ENVIRONMENT DIVISIONS.

3. The DATA DIVISION.

4. Coding Complete COBOL Programs: The PROCEDURE DIVISION.

Unit II: Designing Structured Programs.

5. Designing and Debugging Batch and Interactive COBOL Programs.

6. Moving Data, Printing Information, and Displaying Output Interactively.

7. Computing in COBOL: The Arithmetic Verbs and Intrinsic Functions.

8. Decision Making Using the IF and EVALUATE Statements.

9. Iteration: Beyond the Basic PERFORM.

Unit III: Writing High-Level COBOL Programs.

10. Control Break Processing.

11. Data Validation.

12. Array Processing and Table Handling.

Unit IV: File Maintenance.

13. Sequential File Processing.

14. Sorting and Merging.

15. Indexed and Relative File Processing.

Unit V: Advanced Topics.

16. Improving Program Performance Using the COPY, CALL, and Other Statements.

17. The Report Writer Module.

Appendixes.

A: COBOL Character Set and reserved Words.

B: Differences Among the COBOL Standards.

C: Glossary.

Index.