Thirteen chapters, four appendices, a glossary of terms, and an index make up this book. It has no references and no bibliography. Attached to the back cover is a 1.44MB floppy disk that contains the code and .exe files for the examples considered in the text.

The tone of the book is shown in the preface, where the author remarks that his teaching method “is the old army ‘This is a wrench’ technique.” What this means in effect is that the text contains partial listings of things contained on the accompanying disk, with some minimal comments. A COBOL programmer, presented with a page or so of text, would find it difficult to discover that the language is indeed COBOL.

The excuse is, presumably, that the objective is OS/2 Presentation Manager programming, and to this extent the book succeeds. The user is taken from the “Hello COBOL Programmer” example to more general real information displays; the creation of menu bars, dialogue boxes, and so on; the creation of multiple windows; help screens; report printing; and SQL database operations. The final chapter considers dynamic link libraries, which are a virtual necessity for the production of efficient OS/2 (or Windows) code. The appendices give installation instructions for the associated programs on disk, Program Manager subroutine calls and messages, style classes, and codes.

The last appendix is entitled “Moving up to 32-Bit COBOL” and requires mention because the programs on the disk demand the presence of a Micro Focus COBOL compiler, and the 32-bit version of this compiler is what is “moved up to.” Not having this particular compiler made it impossible for me to test the value of the material supplied.

The book will be useful only to those who are already completely familiar with OS/2 programming and with COBOL; it would be useless as an introductory text.