In this webinar replay, Prof. Tak Auyeung of American River College answers a range of commonly asked COBOL-related questions, such as What is COBOL? Why is it valuable? Where is it being used? and Why should I care?

This presentation serves as an intro to the recently launched “COBOL Programming with VS Code” course, and Prof. Auyeung provides an overview of the content that is covered in the course: basic COBOL concepts such as divisions, verbs, and some basic logic (UNTIL, PERFORM), as well as an exploration of access through use of tools such as VS Code and plugins.

The webinar also includes a presentation by John Mertic, of the Linux Foundation on the Open Mainframe Project. John showcases how this COBOL course fits into the Open Mainframe Project and how you can access not just the course content, but also a system that IBM has provided to run the lab exercises.

The course itself is designed to address employer needs for mainframe application developers. Development of the course started in the Fall of 2019, and it was launched on April 17 of this year. It is the product of collaborative work by subject-matter experts from American River College, IBM, and IBM clients. It was developed to be made available in the public domain, and it is being contributed to the Open Mainframe Project as an open source project to drive further engagement and downstream usage.

And be sure to check out the other videos in the COBOL Fridays webinar series, and all the other helpful resources on the IBM Developer COBOL hub.