* Teaches students to design programs so that they are easy to read, debug, modify, and maintain.
* Provides students with the ability to write well designed elementary, intermediate, and advanced structured COBOL programs in their entirety.
* Familiarizes students with information processing and systems concepts that will help them interact with users and systems analysts when designing programs.
* Familiarize students with programming tools such as pseudocode and hierarchy charts that make program logic more structured, modular, and top-down.
* Teaches students useful techniques for maintaining and modifying older "legacy" programs.
* Student disk containing all data for all programming assignments as well as the full Practice Program from each chapter.
* A fully integrated explanation of the Year 2000 (Y2K) problem and its remedies.
* Pedagogy--Debugging tips and critical thinking questions in each chapter. Each chapter also includes Internet assignments to familiarize students with sites that can be used to enhance their COBOL skills.

Table of Contents:
Unit I: The Basics

1. An Introduction to Structured Program Design in COBOL.

2. The IDENTIFICATION and ENVIRONMENT DIVISIONs.

3. The DATA DIVISION.

4. Coding Complete COBOL Programs: The PROCEDURE DIVISION.

Unit II: Designing Structured Programs.

5. Designing and Debugging Batch and Interactive COBOL Programs.

6. Moving Data, Printing Information, and Displaying Output Interactively.

7. Computing in COBOL: The Arithmetic Verbs and Intrinsic Functions.

8. Decision Making Using the IF and EVALUATE Statements.

9. Iteration: Beyond the Basic PERFORM.

Unit III: Writing High-Level COBOL Programs.

10. Control Break Processing.

11. Data Validation.

12. Array Processing and Table Handling.

Unit IV: File Maintenance

13. Sequential File Processing.

14. Sorting and Merging.

15. Indexed and Relative File Processing.

Unit V: Advanced Topics.

16. Improving Program Performance Using the COPY, CALL, and Other Statements.

17. The Report Writer Module.

18. An Introduction to Object-Oriented Programming.

19. Interactive Programming.

Appendix A: COBOL Character Set and reserved Words.

Appendix B: Data Set for Programming Assignment 2 in Each Chapter.

Appendix C: Differences Among the COBOL Standards.

Appendix D: COBOL and the Year 2000 Problem.

Appendix E: Glossary.