Quick Cobol by Coddington (1 results)
- Hardcover
Seller: Crappy Old Books, Barry, United KingdomCrappy Old Books
Contact seller5-star sellerCondition: Used - Fair
£ 8.50
£ 20.05 shippingShips from United Kingdom to U.S.A.Quantity: 1 available
Hardback. Condition: Fair. Quick COBOL (1971) by L. Coddington is the sort of book that doesn?t so much teach you a programming language as invite you into a particular kind of civilisation ? one built from punched cards, careful indentation, and the quiet certainty that if you name your variables properly, the whole world will…balance its books on time. COBOL, of course, is the language that never really went away. It simply retreated into the warm humming glow of banks, governments, insurance firms and payroll departments, where it has been loyally shuffling money and meaning around for decades, like a very polite but unstoppable clerk who refuses to retire. If you?ve ever wondered what the hidden engine room of the modern world looks like, this is part of it ? not neon cyberpunk, but crisp formality and a deep respect for records . And ?Quick? in 1971 doesn?t mean ?five-minute YouTube tutorial.? It means: Here is a sensible, structured route into a serious language, in a serious book, with serious intent. You can almost smell the chalk dust and hear someone explaining that computers are not toys, and neither is your syntax. This is a splendid time capsule from the era when: computing was corporate, terminals were precious, storage was expensive, and ?user-friendly? meant the manual had a reasonably clear index. Condition (Fair, but honourably so) This copy is Fair , with a quite slanted spine ? as if it spent a few years leaning over someone?s desk, patiently waiting for them to stop panicking and start declaring their data divisions correctly. The important bit: the binding is strong , and the pages are clean and good . So it?s structurally sound, perfectly readable, and ready to be consulted again by anyone who wants to learn the language of institutional endurance. Why you want it Because it?s both practical and oddly philosophical. COBOL is not trendy, and that?s the point. This is programming as administration, as logistics, as the quiet machinery behind civilisation. Owning Quick COBOL is like owning a manual for the bureaucratic heart of the 20th century ? and, inconveniently, quite a lot of the 21st. Perfect for: vintage computing collectors programmers with an unhealthy curiosity about how the world actually runs anyone who enjoys retro technical books with diagrams, discipline, and zero emojis and people who know the future was built by people in shirts who wrote code that looks like English and never apologised for it Crappy Old Books offers it with a crooked spine and clean pages ? a slightly lopsided relic from the era when ?software? wore a tie and ?quick? meant ?methodical..
