What This Book Does Not Cover

This book is not about bashing any technology or company (even when it is deserved). For relational database discussions, I have only included IBM's DB2 database. Most of the SQL- related discussions are easily transferable to other mainframe DBMSs. The mainframe database system referred to as IMS is not discussed (I was never a big fan of this hierarchical type of data structure). The relational approach won me over long ago. In mainframe circles, I would be considered a DB2 bigot.

When I cover mainframe programming languages, I do not discuss the assembler programming language or any language other than COBOL, for that matter. You will also notice that I have omitted any discussion about available products/compilers that enable visual mainframe-type COBOL development to be done on the PC. With these types of PC-based products, a developer compiles the source code and uploads the binary load module from the PC to the mainframe. Although there are some great products out there, I do not discuss them in this book.