Product Description

"Murach’s OS/390 and z/OS JCL" teaches JCL statements and coding techniques for all versions of IBM’s OS/390 operating system, including the latest release, called z/OS, that runs on IBM’s new z/900 servers. This book lets you reach a new level of professionalism in a minimum of time. It takes a practical approach to JCL that zeroes in on everyday jobs, so you can learn to code significant job streams in a hurry. It’s filled with syntax and examples, so you have plenty of guides for coding JCL on your own. And all the content is presented in our distinctive paired-pages method that saves you so much training and reference time, you’ll wonder how you ever got along without it.

But that’s not all…

This book is much more than JCL code, though. It gives you an insight into mainframe processing that any programmer or operator will benefit from. You’ll find out about the hardware components that your JCL is controlling. You’ll find out about the operating system operations that affect the efficiency of your jobs. You’ll find out how file-handling facilities, like VSAM, SMS, and HFS, fit into the overall picture. In fact, you’ll get a complete view of the facilities that OS/390 and z/OS offer.

The result is, you won’t just learn how to code JCL but you’ll know why you code the parameters the way you do. And as you understand more about your system, you’ll find yourself working at a level of confidence and competence that many experienced mainframers lack.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #106477 in Books
• Published on: 2002-03
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 559 pages

From the Publisher
Since the first edition of our JCL book came out in 1980, more than 165,000 programmers have learned JCL from it. Now, we think the improvements to this latest edition, both in the content itself and in the way it’s organized into paired pages, are going to make training and reference easier than ever before.

From the Author
We know how frustrating JCL can be. You write a program that requires some feature of JCL you haven’t used before. So you have to dig through the IBM manuals, trying to figure out which of the details apply to your situation. Or you have to copy a co-worker’s JCL without understanding it, crossing your fingers that the job will run. Or you have to consult the resident JCL “guru” in your shop, who tells you one secret at a time. Once you finally figure out a way to handle the JCL, you do it the same way forever…no matter if it’s the best way or if you know how it works.

But Murach’s OS/390 and z/OS JCL ends the frustration and lets you reach a new level of professionalism in a minimum of time. It takes a practical approach to JCL that zeroes in on everyday jobs, so you can learn to code significant job streams in a hurry. It’s filled with syntax and examples, so you have plenty of guides for coding JCL on your own. And all the content is presented in our distinctive paired-pages method that saves you so much training and reference time, you’ll wonder how you ever got along without it.

About the Author
Raul Menendez got a rude introduction to JCL when he started his programming career 12 years ago. It was his first day on the job after 6 months of programmer training that didn’t include much coverage of JCL, and he was handed a production job stream to debug. He wishes he’d had our JCL book then! In fact, his goal in this latest edition is to save you the hours of trial-and-error he went through as he struggled with that first assignment. So this book has a practical focus that reflects his years of experience as a programmer, project manager, and systems consultant on COBOL/CICS/DB2 projects in both IBM and UNIX environments.

Customer Reviews

A great way to learn about mainframe systems
Several years ago, i had to deal with a mainframe system. My attitude
then was to minimize my exposure as much as possible, as if it were a
disease. I figured that mainframes were obsolete and any time i spent
learning about them would be time wasted. Well, they are still around,
and i recently found myself having to advise some mainframe
testers. Mainframes are still around. It was time for me to learn more
about them.

I picked up Murach's OS/390 and z/OS JCL, and it does an excellent job
of describing the architecture and nomenclature of mainframe
systems. It presumes that you nothing about mainframe systems. To get
started, you should know that MVS, OS/390 and z/OS are all basically
interchangeable terms for the mainframe operating system (quibbling
over these terms would be like quibbling over whether Linux were a
Unix operating system). JCL is "job control language" and is the
original front end for mainframe systems when punch cards were their
primary external interface. There are now a number of easier
interfaces that allow you submit JCL to a mainframe.

Anyhow, this book has been a very valuable guide to me for
understanding the basics of mainframe systems and giving me the
information i need in order to analogies between it and other systems
that i know better. For example, i now know that a data set is kind of
like a file, a directory, or a filesystem, depending on how you look
at it. And i have some sense of what CICS and VSAM are.

I was also surprised to see such a modern book format on a topic that
i'm prone to consider dated. It's a large format with the text running
on the left hand pages and examples, diagrams and summaries on the
right. The main ideas of each spread are covered three times: in the
narrative on the left, and in the examples and summary ("description")
on the right. On many pages, i found myself not turning the page until
i understood the material before me. It's a great format, and on the
strength of it alone, i've already picked up Murach's book on Java for
my technical library.

Working in an OS/390 or z/OS environment, you gotta have ...
Murach's next entry in their upgraded OS/390 titles has arrived and you won't be disappointed. Raul Menendez updates the prior (1980) edition of their MVS JCL text. The result is a JCL training and reference book that should be the first book anyone aspiring to work on the OS/390 or z/OS platforms should acquire.

The first two chapters give a very condensed, but extremely thorough introduction and overview of IBM's mainframe environment from a hardware and operating system perspective. Since we continue to see forecasts that there will be a growing shortage of programmers for this environment, this is exactly the type of "quick start" introduction that will help bring new programmers up to speed. Chapter three gives a very quick overview of ISPF, enough to get started using ISPF to accomplish basic editing, submit jobs, and review job output.

Following the introductory section, Job Control Language is covered from the basics of statement format to how to accomplish more complex tasks - managing program execution, allocating disk and tape datasets, handling special circumstances of SYSOUT datasets, and using procedures. More advanced JCL skills, including conditional processing, job restart/recovery, creating and using generation data groups, and using the Storage Management Subsystem to allocate datasets is covered in the next section.

But this is much more than a simple text on Job Control Language. It includes a section on the basics of Virtual Storage Access Method (VSAM), along with JCL required to create and use VSAM datasets. The chapter covering Access Method Services (IDCAMS) includes just about everything an application programmer will need to know to create and manage VSAM objects. The most commonly used IBM utility programs, such as IEHMOVE, IEBCOPY, and IEBDG are explained with examples for their use. And the chapter devoted to the Sort/Merge utility covers both stand alone and internal sorts along with the most common sort control statements.

The book concludes with a couple of chapters that will provide the reader with a working knowledge of CLISTS, REXX, and UNIX System Services. With the inclusion of the information about SMS and UNIX System Services, the text is desk ready for programmers working in a z/OS environment, IBM's current version of their flagship operating system. But this book will be equally usable by programmers working on earlier versions of OS/390 and MVS. Murach's "paired page" format is easy to read for those using the text in training mode and also makes this a great choice for use as a reference tool.

Very practical and useful
I got more than I expected from "OS/390 and z/OS JCL". Not only were the chapters on JCL itself very clear and complete, but this was really a collection of small reference books. For example, there is a section on IDCAMS, which is going to be very useful, because it has all those parameters that I can never remember. There's another section on batch utilities, which shows you how to use them with HFS directories.

I would very much recommend this book to anyone new to z/OS -- or anyone like myself who gets annoyed at how difficult it is to find out some detail that they have just forgotten.