Advice on COBOL training

The reason I believe you may find that there are no classes for generic COBOL, is that the language is designed to be self describing, if you have a basic grasp of both the English language and logic.

Personally, I learn using the "COBOL For Dummies" book. Another great place is the source itself.

As for learning MicroFocus COBOL, there's little point, as Lawson 4GL modifies it.

With that said, there *are* classes for the Application Developer tools (4GL).
I would highly recommend it if you need to develop in today's environments.

Now, if you're new to Lawson, and the place you're working is a more recent Infor customer (1-2 years), I'd focus on the Java based products and learning the configuration tools, mongoose, etc, as those are the future of the product offerings.

Kwane

Thanks Kwane. I just downloaded "Cobol in 21 days".

Jude...

Lawson (Infor) using Micro Focus COBOL not ANS COBOL. Lawson has made a few tweaks to the MF compiler but is still MS COBOL for the most part. Having taught the Lawson 4GL courses for many years, it will not teach you COBOL. It is assumed that those attending the courses already has a solid knowledge of COBOL. As the course is designed it is not a "development" course, but I always use to go into more development oriented discussions to help those in the class to be productive when they return to their offices. This varied however, depending on who is teaching the course.

I agree with the other comments that Lawson's flavor of micro focus COBOL is a minor detail. The main thing with Lawson development is in understanding the different canned/prebuilt database table access procedures, when to use them and how they pull the data one record at a time. This can be difficult when validation testing. All-in-All the 4GL process makes developing much easier than tradition coding with COBOL. That COBOL book should give you some basic knowledge and Infor has the 4GL developer's guide for using those procedures.

I have this same question as you only for version XI. What skills, language version, testing tools do to I need to have in order to migrate my current customizations to the new java based code?  I need to get my team trained within the next 6 months or so.