Rating: 
Summary: Good beginner's book
Review: Good learning tool for the beginner, but too much "deja-vu" for the RPG III programmer. Errors in the text of her RPG/400 book are still present in this one: Specification of AND/OR SELECT/OMIT lines in Logical File DDS, and erroneous from/to locations for user ID in Program Status Data Structure.
Rating:
Summary: Good beginner's book
Review: Good learning tool for the beginner, but too much "deja-vu" for the RPG III programmer. Errors in the text of her RPG/400 book are still present in this one: Specification of AND/OR SELECT/OMIT lines in Logical File DDS, and erroneous from/to locations for user ID in Program Status Data Structure.
Rating: 
Summary: Great book! but CHECK THE REVISION CODE!
Review: I am currently entering my 2nd semester using this book! the book itself is excellant and well written, especially for the beginner! But take care of which version you get! The only Dif. is the number on the inside cover, and the color of the printer spacing charts in the exercises, while the good oone has all black charts. The book with 123456KP10987 under the ISBN number on the inside page FALLS APART! (Happened to EVERY classmate who used it!), the BAD version also has blue green colored charts in the chapter exercises. BUT ... IT IS A GREAT BOOK TO LEARN FROM!!
Rating: 
Summary: Not for beginners
Review: I purchased this book while in College and attempted to use it several times to program in RPG, however, the lack of extensive examples and the lack of explaination towards older RPG code has caused me to look for something more useful. I had a lot of trouble trying to learn from this book, althought it may be ok as a reference.
Rating: 
Summary: Use this book for a bon-fire!
Review: I took RPG IV this past semester and used this book to "learn" it. The book is a bore to read and needs to start off a little slower. RPG is a strange, old programming language and needs to be explained better then what this book does. The book need many more examples and example code. I'd rather be fooling with C\C++ pointers all day then work with this book and RPG IV. Don't be a programming dinosaur, stay away from RPG and this book!
Rating:
Summary: Where I learned RPG
Review: I was brought into the IT world through RPG. I was stolen from the business side and thrown into RPG with no schooling or experience. This book got me through the darkest hours of frustration. It is like an old friend. Examples are easy to follow. And, it isn't for people who need a little knowledge in AS/400-speak. It is for people who want to write programs.
Rating:
Summary: Where I learned RPG
Review: I was brought into the IT world through RPG. I was stolen from the business side and thrown into RPG with no schooling or experience. This book got me through the darkest hours of frustration. It is like an old friend. Examples are easy to follow. And, it isn't for people who need a little knowledge in AS/400-speak. It is for people who want to write programs.
Rating:
Summary: This is an excellent book for the beginner.
Review: I was given this book as part of my companies training to be an AS/400 programmer. The concepts in this book were easy to understand in the format that they were layed out, and the section on legacy applications was usefull in the fact that our company has alot of older 36 code that still has to be maintained.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent RPG Reference
Review: I've used this book as my main reference at work and around 9 times out of 10, it has answered my questions. If I did not find it in the book, certainly IBM's website came to the rescue. However, the book paid for itself after I got the answer to my third question:-) I would have rated it 4.5 stars because there is a slight room for improvement, but it paid for itself already! While most of the code samples are quite clear, some topics would have been better explained in the context of a small but complete program. The addition of a few COMPLETE program samples e.g. maintenance/subfile/table handling etc. (not code snippets) with annotations would bring the book closer to perfection.
Rating:
Summary: An excellent introduction to RPG IV
Review: My workgroup purchased this book some time ago. Judy writes excellent, no-nonsense books about RPG programming. We all find this to be a very helpful text. Especially our junior programmers find it useful. For example, she has a whole chapter on structured programming. That's something the senior programmers don't care about (and one therefore doesn't much like the book), but still it's an excellent text. It's usually pretty easy to find what you need in the index, and her examples are easy to follow.
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