Re: Newbie Questions

Paul,

In a message dated 98-10-10 18:49:13 EDT, you write:

> Having 'grown up' with the S/38 and the AS/400, watching all of the things
>  get added on, enhanced, improved, and streamlined, it's hard to imagine a
>  "Newbie" being thrown into the entire AS/400 ocean headfirst, without a
>  life preserver (let along a life raft), and attempt to make sense of the
>  basic things:  logical files. Members of files.  Join files.  Work
>  management, including routing programs, classes, jobd descriptions, job
>  queues, subsystems, and all that stuff. Queues: job, message, out, and
>  data.  Communications: Lines, controllers, devices.  TCP/IP, SNADS, SNA,
>  and all the rest.  COMMANDS!  The program the command uses.  The parameter
>  validation program.  Referential integrity.  Triggers.  Roy Rogers (sorry).

Amazing, isn't it?  I work with a ("real" employee) technical staff of 8, and
not a one of them has more than a "I've heard about those" understanding of
any of the topics you just mentioned.  I try to teach them, but between the
lack of desire and lack of authorization, they don't learn.

>  How does someone understand the relationships between all of the pieces: LF
>  to PF to join file.  Jobq to executing program to outq.  How to submit a
>  job using the parameters stored in the JOBD, class, user profile, and the
>  interactive job.  How do you find you reports, based on the queue specified
>  in the user profile, the jobd, the class, the SBMJOB command, and the print
>  file?

A mentor, the books aren't much help to most people on these subjects.

>  In short, there's a lot to learn!  When I first learned Fortran, they gave
>  us a single piece of paper and said, "Put these cards at the beginning of
>  your deck, these at the back, and it'll work."  Remember cards?

Oh, yeah!  Especially in school when they handed you that HASP card but didn't
bother to explain what it did...

>  Now, to even get to the "Hello World" stage in programming the AS400, you
>  have to know how to use PDM or SEU, RPG or RPG/ILE, and display files.
>  Then you have to compile the program (and the display file): interactively
>  or submitted to batch.  If you submit it to batch, which jobq in which
>  subsystem do you put it?

And who tells you this?

>  If we expect Newbies to do more with the AS/400 than just cringe in
>  amazement that it even works, we have to help them learn how the pieces fit
>  together.

AMEN!

>  The questions may be 'boring' or 'simple' or 'totally clueless,' but
>  they're the only way someone with zero experience can solve the problems
>  that even a manual won't answer.  What manual tells you that a RETURN in a
>  COBOL program only works 'properly' if there's another COBOL program higher
>  up in the invocation stack?
>  
>  Welcome, Newbies!  It's uphill all the way, but the view is tremendous!

Ain't it glorious!

Dean Asmussen
Enterprise Systems Consulting, Inc.
Fuquay-Varina, NC  USA
E-Mail:  DAsmussen@aol.com

"Those who agree with us may not be right, but we admire their astuteness." --
Cullen Hightower
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