Centuria is for anyone who wants to learn how to develop structured COBOL programs for IBM mainframes. It works if you have no programming experience. It works if you've developed programs with another language like Java, C#, or Visual Basic. And it works if you've developed COBOL programs on a PC, but you've never learned COBOL at the professional level that's needed on a mainframe.

Today, most companies don't use COBOL for developing new applications. That's why it is often called a "dying language." However, there is still a large backlog of "legacy" COBOL programs that are running on mainframes. Those programs need to be maintained. And this is the only book that shows you the techniques that were used to develop those programs.

In summary, then, this is the right book for anyone who needs to use structured COBOL on a mainframe. That includes maintenance programmers who need to maintain legacy COBOL programs. That also includes new application developers who need to interface with legacy COBOL programs.