COBOL (Common Business-Oriented Language) was developed in 1959 and, since then, has been used as the basis for many business and government applications. Reports show that over 80% of the world's business applications run on COBOL with billions more lines of code existing and billions being written annually.
Micro Focus has been the market leader and provider of distributed COBOL development tooling for nearly 40 years. Micro Focus's COBOL has evolved and today it differs significantly to the COBOL language of 1959, embracing object-orientation and enabling you to write code that takes full advantage of new operating systems and platforms such as Microsoft's .NET framework and the Java Virtual Machine (JVM).
To help you learn COBOL, Micro Focus provides a wide range of resources to help you get started with the basics of the language:
The course is available from a link in your Micro Focus Electronic Product Delivery email which you were sent about your license. Follow the link and click the Documentation tab.
Though the course uses Visual COBOL to demonstrate the programming concepts, all of the information applies equally to Enterprise Developer.
This is a standard COBOL programming course. It does not include instructions about how to create applications that use Mainframe Subsystem Support (such as CICS, IMS, JCL and PL/I).
Check the available tutorials ranging from a basic tutorial showing you how to create your First Hello COBOL World Application to more advanced tutorials showing how to use various programming techniques.
Find more information on various aspects of COBOL programming in the rest of this section.
Also, explore our detailed COBOL Language Reference for in-depth information about the syntax and the usage of the COBOL language.
Explore the power of COBOL to prepare your applications for interaction with modern day technologies. Managed COBOL is COBOL with extensions to support the JVM and the .NET frameworks, respectively. It offers support for object orientation and access to the available Java class libraries or the .NET CLR. See:
For more, see the resources available in the Related Information.