mainframes

I purchased this book while in College and attempted to use it several times to program in RPG, however, the lack of extensive examples and the lack of explaination towards older RPG code has caused me to look for something more useful. I had a lot of trouble trying to learn from this book, althought it may be ok as a reference.

I was brought into the IT world through RPG. I was stolen from the business side and thrown into RPG with no schooling or experience. This book got me through the darkest hours of frustration. It is like an old friend. Examples are easy to follow. And, it isn't for people who need a little knowledge in AS/400-speak. It is for people who want to write programs.

I've used this book as my main reference at work and around 9 times out of 10, it has answered my questions. If I did not find it in the book, certainly IBM's website came to the rescue. However, the book paid for itself after I got the answer to my third question:-)

I would have rated it 4.5 stars because there is a slight room for improvement, but it paid for itself already! While most of the code samples are quite clear, some topics would have been better explained in the context of a small but complete program. The addition of a few COMPLETE program samples e.g. maintenance/subfile/table handling etc. (not code snippets) with annotations would bring the book closer to perfection.