Learn Rocket® COBOL Extension (formerly a Micro Focus® product)

Micro Focus® is a trademark of OpenText; Rocket Software is not affiliated with OpenText.

Please visit www.cobol.com to enroll in the free course that accompanies this extension.

The Learn Rocket COBOL extension provides all training materials for the Rocket COBOL Fundamentals Training course, with links to the video lessons.

Rocket COBOL Fundamentals Training is a free, instructor-led video training course in the COBOL programming language. The course teaches the fundamentals of the COBOL language, introduces the Rocket COBOL syntax, and usage of Rocket COBOL tools.

Who is this course for? The course is ideal for developers familiar with C, Java, or .NET who want to learn COBOL. It doesn't matter what language you know, as long as you have experience of standard programming concepts, this course is for you.

Why learn COBOL? It's likely you'll encounter COBOL in your career. This course will give you a great foundation so you know what to expect. The COBOL you will be learning is Rocket COBOL, the most widely used COBOL dialect on Windows and Linux.

What is included? The course consists of about two hours of instructor-led videos, alongside quiz questions and notebooks with hands-on exercises.

How long will it take to complete the course? You should be able to get the software installed, complete the video training and exercises in about a day. You can certainly spend time going deeper into the hand-on exercises with several resources available for the inquisitive mind.

Get your Rocket COBOL Certification: Each chapter of the course comes with a set of quiz questions to test your understanding and some hands-on assignments. You can complete the course in under a day or spend longer exploring the exercises. Once complete, you will be issued with a digital certificate.

Where do I get help? Post your question on the Community site.

For full details about the COBOL course visit www.cobol.com.

Getting Started

Prerequisites

• On Windows, you need to have Microsoft's Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2022 for x64 installed.

Access the Rocket COBOL Fundamentals Training video course

1. Navigate to the www.cobol.com site.
2. Click Register for the course in the Register here section. Alternatively, access the course from the following direct link.
3. Sign in, or click Create an Account to register if you do not have an account on the Saba platform yet.
4. Fill in all the required details, and click Create Login. This opens the page for Rocket COBOL Fundamentals Training.
5. Click ENROLL.
6. Click LAUNCH to start the course.

Access the notebooks

1. Click (Learn COBOL) in the Visual Studio Code Activity bar to access the LEARN COBOL: TOPICS pane. This opens a list of the notebooks available for the different chapters of the course.
2. Click on a notebook to open it. Each notebook contains a summary of a chapter of the course, the URLs for the relevant chapter of the video course, code examples, and some hands-on assignments.

You can use the Learn COBOL extension for Visual Studio Code beyond this course. You can experiment with writing, compiling, and debugging COBOL programs, and you can create your own COBOL notebooks.

Find copies of the sample programs and the notebooks on GitHub.

Further Information

For further information about the functionality provided by the Learn COBOL extension - such as creating, compiling, and debugging COBOL programs - refer to the documentation of the Rocket COBOL extension for Visual Studio Code.