IBM Mainframe Forum

[gudise]

hi this srinivas...i am beginner i dnt knw abt main frames...any one can suggest me how to start and how to do...please try to help me...

[Robert Sample]

Your question is so broad that any answer we could give you would be meaningless. The mainframe world tends to be divided into applications development, systems support, operations, and maintenance. Each of these areas has hundreds of potential programs, utilities, packages, and methods to learn. Applications development, just to pick one, is generally divided into online and batch applications. There are multiple online systems which can be used. Applications can be written in COBOL, Assembler, PL/1, FORTRAN, or many other languages. Applications can use a database (such as DB2, IMS, IDMS, ...) or VSAM files (there are ESDS, KSDS, RRDS, LDS types), or sequential files. Each programming language has different ways to access each of these different data stores.

My shop does not have DB2 or several other commonly used packages, yet we have just over 1,500 manuals in our online library. If you can refine your question, great. Otherwise, hopefully all this tells you just how impossible your question is to answer.