Further Reading: Building a Complete Banking Transaction System

Books

  • Murach's CICS for the COBOL Programmer by Raul Menendez and Doug Lowe. The definitive guide to CICS programming. Covers BMS maps, pseudo-conversational design, file control, and program control in detail. Essential for anyone extending the ACCT-INQ program.

  • VSAM: Access Method Services and Application Programming (IBM SC26-4579). The IBM reference for VSAM. Covers DEFINE CLUSTER, IDCAMS utilities, share options, performance tuning, and diagnosis. Dense but authoritative.

  • Enterprise COBOL for z/OS: Programming Guide (IBM SC27-1412). The official IBM programming guide for Enterprise COBOL. Covers the CALL statement, LINKAGE SECTION, and subprogram design patterns used in UTIL-DATE.

  • MVS JCL Reference (IBM SA23-1385). Comprehensive reference for JCL statements and parameters. Useful for understanding COND parameters, GDGs, and DISP processing.

IBM Redbooks

  • VSAM Demystified (SG24-6105). A practical guide to VSAM performance tuning, including buffer allocation, CI sizing, free space management, and reorganization strategies. Directly applicable to the performance optimization discussed in Case Study 2.

  • CICS Transaction Server: Application Programming (SG24-5435). Covers modern CICS application design, including the pseudo-conversational model, COMMAREA handling, and RESP code processing.

Online Resources

  • IBM Z Xplore (https://www.ibm.com/it-infrastructure/z/education/zxplore). Free hands-on mainframe learning environment. Includes JCL, COBOL, VSAM, and CICS exercises that complement this chapter's capstone project.

  • GnuCOBOL FAQ and Manual (https://gnucobol.sourceforge.io/). Documentation for the open-source COBOL compiler. Useful for running COBOL programs on Linux, macOS, or Windows without mainframe access. Note that CICS and VSAM features are not available in GnuCOBOL.

  • COBOL Programming Course (Open Mainframe Project). A free, community-developed COBOL course hosted on GitHub. Covers fundamentals through advanced topics with hands-on labs.

Standards and Specifications

  • ISO/IEC 1989:2023 — COBOL Standard. The most recent ISO COBOL standard. Useful as a reference for language features and their intended behavior.

Topics for Further Exploration

  • Two-Phase Commit in CICS: How CICS manages transactional integrity across multiple resources (files, DB2 tables, MQ queues) using syncpoint processing. This addresses the transfer atomicity problem identified in this chapter.

  • CICS Resource Definition: How CICS FCT (File Control Table) entries define the relationship between program file names and physical VSAM files. Understanding RDO (Resource Definition Online) is essential for deploying CICS programs.

  • Checkpoint/Restart: IBM's checkpoint/restart facility for long-running batch programs. Particularly relevant for TXN-PROC if transaction volumes grow large enough to make restart after failure important.

  • RACF Security: How IBM's security product controls access to datasets, CICS transactions, and z/OS resources. Essential background for building production-quality systems.