Mainframe, MVS and zOS Discussion

Hi All,
I want to learn REXX and SAS, what are the books for learning REXX and SAS you would recommend. Please share some book names which can be of help.

Google. Avoid "Rexx - Programmer's Reference" because despite it saying several times that it is a complete reference a lot of it points you to other publications. I think I wasted my money buying it.

I know nothing about SAS but for Rexx you can get a version that runs on the PC under Windoze and Linux (and, presumably MAC) and that includes documentation which is generally easy enough to read. As mostPC implementations of Rexx are free you can try various flavours until you find one that is best for you.

Have you looked at the SAS Institute web site?  http://support.sas.com/publishing/index.html has a number of books and some of them are pretty good for people wanting to learn SAS basics and sometimes some of the advanced topics.
One of the issues I have with your post is that SAS is a VERY broad topic -- do you want to learn basic SAS programming? Using some of the SAS tools?  If so, which tools?  Are you wanting to do exploratory data analysis, or statistical work, or specialized processing (economics, biology, chemistry, psychology for example), or do you want to use SAS to write reports?  These are all good and valid reasons to use SAS but each takes you in a different direction as far as what you need to learn.

Hi,

You could start from here

http://publibz.boulder.ibm.com/cgi-bin/ ... 0706113306
http://publibz.boulder.ibm.com/cgi-bin/ ... 0603150559

But also you might need to read further on ISPF and TSO ...

http://publibz.boulder.ibm.com/cgi-bin/ ... 90/library could be searched here

For SAS you could start here

http://support.sas.com/documentation/

nicc wrote:Google. Avoid "Rexx - Programmer's Reference" because despite it saying several times that it is a complete reference  a lot of it points you to other publications. I think I wasted my money buying it.

Are you referring to the book forwarded by Michael Cowlishaw? Here is a soft copy of it:

http://www.rexxla.org/rexxlang/Rexx_Pro ... erence.pdf

Though I find it as a fine book, as my knowledge in REXX is not that apt. I think it's good for starters.

That is the book - sitting on the table behind me. Very few pages were of interest when I fist got it. But my 'beef' with it is that it says it is a complete reference and then refers one to other sources. Also, as I read it I made notes when I found discrepancies - quite a few. Also, there is a chapter titled 'Arrays' - Rexx does not have arrays - it has 'stem variables'. I actuallhy learned from Mike Cowlishaw's book 'The Rexx Language - 2nd Edition' known as 'TRL2' and 'Modern programming using Rexx' by Robert O'Hara and Ross Gomberg but, although they are slim volumes they are now very expensive (or can be). Just looked at the original price of the second of those - AUD73.95. I must have been rich then!

Thanks.

In my search of learning REXX I found that there is OOREXX which can be used at home PC to learn REXX. Is it very much similar to REXX on mainframes or it is significantly different?

I don't find a way to practice SAS though.

All Rexx implementations (that I know of) conform to standard but there ae manuy extensions and not all implementations provide the ame extensions. Rexx on zOS does not use the stream I/O functions (charin/out linein/out etc) unless an add-on package is used but does provide EXECIO which most other implementations do not (OORexx does provide a version of EXECIO but I am not sure how complete it is. But apart from that, if you only use base keywords and functions then your rexx program should run on any rexx interpreter.

Thanks for your inputs nicc. I'll keep them in mind...