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DSU’s Daniel Contributes to COBOL Textbook

Madison -- Connie Daniel, a professor for the College of Business & Information Systems at Dakota State University, recently wrote the Instructor’s Manual for the 8^th edition of the textbook Structured COBOL Programming, published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. The textbook itself was written by Nancy Stern (Hofstra University) and Robert A. Stern (Nassau Community College).

"My job was to read through the new edition of the textbook and make appropriate changes to the Instructor’s Manual so that it reflected the changes made in the 8^th edition of the textbook," said Daniel.

Daniel said that each chapter of the manual required a different approach. Some chapters needed minor revision, while others had to be started from scratch since they were new chapters in the textbook.

"For one of the chapters, I needed to prepare four flowcharts. While I could have done this by hand in about 15 minutes, I needed to instead create the flowcharts on the computer. By the time that I located flowcharting software and learned how to use it, those four flowcharts ended up taking more like 10 hours of time," said Daniel. "Another challenge was writing the chapter on a topic that was new to me: Object Oriented COBOL Programming. I spent one entire weekend reading up on the topic so I could develop a stronger background. Again, this took a lot of time, but now I know more about the subject."

Her biggest challenge, remarked Daniel, was the time deadline. From the time she received the project until the due date, she had about 5 weeks in which to complete the project.

How Daniel got involved in this project is quite unique. She said that several years ago, while working through a computer manual published by Wiley, she noticed some errors. "On a whim, I sent a letter to the publisher with a list of corrections that needed to be made in the manual. I received a thank you letter from David Kear, an editor at Wiley. Since then, Mr. Kear has contacted me to do several projects, including reviewing the 7^th edition of the COBOL textbook," said Daniel. She has also reviewed a proposal for a manuscript and the manuscript itself for a software package that is used for COBOL programming.

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