Cobol made simple, but never sexy

Cobol Made Simple: For the Year 2000, Conor Sexton, Made Simple Books, £12.50

Cobol Made Simple: For the Year 2000, Conor Sexton, Made Simple Books, £12.50

Many years ago, I sat in a Cobol programming shop and awaited the arrival of the much-put-upon operator with the print-out from my latest stab at a working program. (In those far-off days, jobs were submitted in batches and the results, if any, distributed to the eager programmers - like feeding time at the zoo.)

A bulky print-out duly arrived - surely this was it, a precisely formatted report. Alas, I had typed in environment division instead of environment division and the entire print file was composed of Cobol compiler errors. Typical Cobol - it's an ugly, patronising, unforgiving language and utterly unsexy. Cobol lacks the elegance of Pas- cal, the brevity of C and the mathematical precision of the only older language, the venerable FORTRAN. Even Conor Sexton's admirably clear and concise book and his mercifully short examples can't hide the essential tediousness of the language. Its very name is boring (Common Business Oriented Language).

So why learn it? Sexton says that 60 per cent of the world's programming code is Cobol and, of course, Cobol programmers were responsible more than anyone else for failing to plan for Y2K, creating today's demand for grizzled Cobol coders and/or bright young things who can grapple with the ancient tongue. The latter will be delighted with Sexton's book which explains the essentials of Cobol while glossing over its more arcane features. It's a delight to savour old chestnuts like the dangers of the GOTO statement in a structured programming environment and the many ways of reading an indexed sequential file. After having ploughed through the Cobol tuition (and ploughing through is what one does with Cobol), the reader may be disappointed that Sexton, in the final chapter, offers no magic solutions to the Y2K bug - just more hard slog, I'm afraid. Reading this book was like meeting an old reliable, if often irritating, friend. To be honest, I couldn't put it down.

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Perl Cookbook, Tom Christiansen and Nathan Torkington, O'Reilly & Associates, £32.78

Learning Perl can be a tortuous experience. The scripting language which is the engine behind many major web sites holds out the possibility of great power and flexibility in tiny programs. Achieving these benefits, however, means getting to grips with a cryptic grammar in which every character on the keyboard has been pressed into service several times, with meanings that vary widely depending on the context.

It is a Perl mantra that "there's more than one way to do it". Very often the novice programmer, trying to batter a program into shape with the manual in hand would settle happily for just one way of doing it, as long as that worked.

If "it" or something like it features in one of the hundreds of "recipes" in this cookbook, help is at hand. The individual examples, with clear commentaries, range from one-liners as simple as capturing the current date to full programs for database access or Web automation. As well as a wide range of complexity, the examples show the huge variety of scripting tasks Perl can take on.

Anyone using the language, from the most cack-handed beginner to the red-hot Perl hacker, is likely to find dozens of time-saving tips here.