As a C++ programmer, I always refer to The C++ Programming Language by Bjarne Stroustrup as my C++ "Bible". It's not necessarily the best tutorial. It's not the official specification. It's not necessarily even the best reference. But I believe most C++ programmers would agree that it is regarded as authoritative.
Is there a similarly regarded "Bible" for COBOL?
I just asked my long-time COBOL-guru colleague, and he says his 'bible' was (and is) always the official IBM Programming guide.
I was poking around on google and found this: http://infogoal.com/cbd/cbdref.htm, which seems to have several links to COBOL resources, including IBM docs.
No. COBOL was invented before books. Or more accurately, when COBOL was invented the concept of publishing a book about a programming language (for the other 17 people who might want to read it) would have been ludicrous.
But seriously, in my five years as a mainframe COBOL programmer the only COBOL books I ever saw on people's desks (in the mid-1990s) were old college textbooks from the mid-1970s. Not that there are no good COBOL books, just that there is no widely accepted "biblical" reference type book.
Amazon has a few COBOL books that are of recent vintage. I can't vouch for any of them, though.
Wow... Blast from the past...
I remember the one I always went to was a COBOL manual produced by DEC which was widely acknowledged in the programming community I inhabited at the time as the reference work on COBOL. However this was at the start of the last ice age since when DEC has disappeared and the manuals with it.
...or so I thought... (click here)
it even looks like it has been updated
I think here in Holland most developers see the COBOL teaching books by Ebbinkhuijsen as the bible. But they're in Dutch.
However, a generic bible book is never enough. There comes a point where you need your compiler reference for specific implementation details and available extensions.
I was born and raised on Stern and Stern's Structured Cobol Programming, but I don't know of its biblical significance. (it did teach me COBOL, however.)
Two excellent books I use are COBOL: From Micro to Mainframe and Murach's Mainframe COBOL. I also see these on desks of other COBOL developers at my place of work.
I'm having a cleanup and was feeling remorseful about throwing out my definitive User and Reference guides from DEC for VMS.
Luckly here they are, lovingly maintained by HP.
http://h71000.www7.hp.com/doc/cobol.html
Well done HP!
For technical reference the official IBM COBOL Language Guides are unbeatable.
They are well written and 90% of the content applies to the COBOL language in general.
For a guide on how to code COBOL well the early "Jackson Structured Programming" books concentrated on how to produce well structured code in an essentially unstructured language nearly all the examples were in COBOL.
They are all probably out of print now but you may find a copy somewhere.
The examples on how to code up file merges are a revalation and apply to any language (I did an implementation in perl once!)
According to this question, Murach's Maniframe COBOL by Mike Murache et al, is a good "bible":
