Re: [PLUG] Book: Modern Mainframe Development

["Elizabeth K. Joseph via plug" <plug@lists.phillylinux.org>]

On Sat, Apr 9, 2022 at 12:00 PM JP Vossen via plug
<plug@lists.phillylinux.org> wrote:
> While this may seem OT for this list, it's not.
>
> I've just started reading a 2022-03 _Modern Mainframe Development_ book
> (345 pages), and I find it really interesting.  Thus far it has made a compelling
> case for the strong demand side of skilling up in COBOL and IBM mainframe
> technologies.  This is pretty interesting too: https://github.com/search?q=COBOL.

As you may expect, I have a lot to say about this :) I too am making
my way through this book (disclaimer: O'Reilly sent me a review copy
due to my "expertise and influence in this area"). I was in touch with
Tom just prior to his book release, nice guy and a quick look at the
acknowledgements shows me that he really did his homework and spoke
with the right people to put this book together.

The reason I started working in this space (aside from the cool
hardware: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDtaanCENbc) was because
mainframe shops are adopting DevOps tooling, Agile, and integrating
Linux a lot more into their ecosystems and hybrid strategy, and that's
been really interesting to work on given my background in distributed
Linux systems.

As far as COBOL goes, the Linux Foundation Open Mainframe Project has
a few open source initiatives in the COBOL space, including the COBOL
Working Group that has been doing surveys and collecting data these
past couple years about COBOL use and it's really interesting to see
an independently collected (see their report at
https://techchannel.com/Trends/10/2021/special-report-cobol-survey).
They also did a great session at last year's Open Mainframe Summit,
linked in this blog post (along with some of the usage stats and info
about the group):
https://www.openmainframeproject.org/blog/2021/12/15/the-uncommonly-common-sense-of-cobol

--
Elizabeth K. Joseph || Lyz || pleia2
___________________________________________________________________________
Philadelphia Linux Users Group         --        http://www.phillylinux.org
Announcements - http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-announce
General Discussion  --   http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug