Simply stated this book was written to fill a need for a text devoted to teaching business data processing students the principles of file processing, using sufficient COBOL program excerpts to illustrate these principles in practies. By emphasizing file processing principles, students are freed from unnecessary COBOL coding detail that may obscure programming issues and prevent them from writing efficient, maintainable programs
BUSINESS FILE PROCESSING! COBOL, CICS and SQL can be used in courses on file processing offered in business programs, and even in some courses in computer science departments. In some cases, an advanced COBOL book will have been used in previous years. I believe that in many of these courses, instructors would prefer to emphasize file processing first and COBOL second. It is primarily for such courses that this book has been written.