Why look at COBOL? I’ve always been interested in “outdated” programming languages; one of these years I’ll actually get into LISP seriously, but I see a lot more (sadly) about COBOL in news and blog articles, so I’m getting to that one first. For another reason: I want to learn a major imperative language that isn’t C, and COBOL definitely seems like a better goal than FORTRAN. Here are some of the main sources I am working from.
What You Think You Know About COBOL is Probably Wrong: Making Tech Stack Decisions When the State of the Art is a Septuagenarian - What I wish I had read as my first real encounter with COBOL.
COBOL: Past, Present and Future - Misty Decker & Derek Britton, Micro Focus - A longer summary video from (two of) the authors
The workhorse computing language suffers from a “major image problem” rooted in fundamental misperceptions, researchers say. - How I found that first link.
COBOL in [about] 100 seconds - Youtube video from the legendary Fireship.io
COBOL Essential Training by Peggy Fisher - An Intro Course on LinkedInLearning.com. I don’t necessarily recommend this as a starting point, because in addition to being paywalled, there are annotation problems in the very first code example.
Migrating COBOL Apps by Malcolm Shore - I haven’t started this course yet, but as it appears to be the only “advanced” course on COBOL offered by LinkedIn learning, I expect I’ll go through it soon.
Basic Introduction to using COBOL by Priscilla Grocer - The very basic “start here” document from the first actual COBOL curriculum I have found.
Introduction to Programming (COBOL) CIS12 by Priscilla Grocer - The class that the previous link is taken from.