New to COBOL

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).

Where to start?

Micro Focus provides the following resources to help you get started with COBOL programming:

  • A Micro Focus course introducing you to COBOL programming, Visual COBOL: Modern COBOL for the Next Generation.

    This course is the ideal first step on your journey to learning about the COBOL language and how to take advantage of what Enterprise Developer can do for you. After taking the course you will have a good knowledge of the basics of COBOL and Enterprise Developer, and will be ready to build on that general knowledge by learning more about taking full advantage of Enterprise Developer to meet the specific requirements of your applications.

    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.

    Although the course uses Visual COBOL to demonstrate the programming concepts, all of the information in the course 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).

  • Once you have completed the course, continue by Creating Your First Hello COBOL World Application.

What next?

Once you've used the above resources to see how to get started with COBOL programming you're ready to dig a little deeper and learn more about how you can use COBOL to develop your applications. Micro Focus provides a variety of resources to enable you to do this: