The NetRexx Tutorial - Review of this book

 
DISCLAIMER:
 
ALL THE  EXAMPLES  PRESENTED  IN THIS BOOK HAVE BEEN TESTED  ON
SEVERAL PLATFORMS.
THIS DOCUMENT   IS   PROVIDED ON  AN  'AS-IS' BASIS. THE AUTHOR
TAKES  NO  RESPONSABILITY  FOR ERRONEOUS, MISSING OR MISLEADING
INFORMATION, OR  FOR  ANY LOSS OF DATA, BUSINESS  OR  HARDWARE,
DUE  TO  THE  USE OF ANY  INFORMATION  OR  CODE  GIVEN  IN THIS
BOOK.
 

All rights reserved. No parts of this publication may be reproduced stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior consent of the author.

 
Copyright (C) 1997 by Pierantonio Marchesini
of the ETH / Zurich.
 
You can get a copy of the latest version of this document
from mpie@ch.ibm.com.
 
Copyrights:
 
NetRexx is Copyright (C) 1997 by IBM Corporation
 
Trademarks:

MVS, VM/CMS, IBM are trademarks by International
Business Machines Corporation.
 

 
 
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This document is available in an as-is format for all the people interested in NetRexx. This document is still in DRAFT form. All the sections marked:

 
***
***  MISSING PART
***
 

should be regarded as on-going or future work.

Look in "Appendix Z" to see the latest changes in the document.

Feel free to send me any comment, question, etc. on this document. My email is Pierantonio.Marchesini@cern.ch.

English is NOT my mother tongue, as you might have already guessed from those very first sentences. The final book will be corrected (I promise) by a professional editor. If a particular sentence is way too obscure (since I wrote it in my Italian-English) please let me know, and it will be corrected.

A full description of this document current status is available in the next page.

Since, as I said, this is a 'living' document, the following table resumes the status of the various chapters, as they appear in this document. A 0 means that the chapter is still totally empty. A 10 means that the chapter is finished and only corrections are pending.

 

Part One

   - Basic concepts                     4
   - Introduction to NetRexx            7.5
   - Language Basics                    9
   - Operations on Numbers              9
   - Operations on Strings              9.5
   - Control Structures                 8

Part Two

   - Objects, Classes and Interfaces    5
   - Operations on files                6
   - Sockets and Networking             5
   - System Interface                   5
   - Threads                            2
   - Database Operations                0

Part Three

   - Applets                            1
   - Graphical Interfaces               0
   - Advanced Graphics                  0
   - Advanced WEB server                1
   - Full OOP projects                  0

Part Four

   - Additional Instructions            7
   - More on Algorithms                 4
   - NetRexx for REXXers                4
   - Tools                              1
   - Miscellaneous                      0

 

Review of this book

• What is NetRexx? Quoting NetRexx's author, Mike Cowlishaw, "NetRexx is a programming language derived from both REXX and Java(tm); NetRexx is a dialect of REXX, so it is as easy to learn and use as REXX, and it retains the portability and efficiency of Java." Using NetRexx you can create programs and applets for the Java environment more easily than programming in Java itself. Using NetRexx you rarely have to worry about the different types and numbers that Java requires. The "dirty" job is done by the language for you.
• What is REXX? REXX is an interpreted language originally developed by IBM in 1979. REXX was designed to be platform-independent and is the procedural language shipped with the operating system both on Mainframe Systems (MVS, VM/CMS) and on Personal Systems (OS/2, Amiga). REXX is available on almost any platform as a product, or as a public domain implementation. Due to its simplicity and ease of use, REXX can be thought as a 'Personal' Language - practical not only for the professional programmer, but also for the occasional one. For example, you can use it to quickly test an algorithm before implementation, even when using other languages.
• To whom is this book addressed? This book is addressed both to neophytes and to experienced programmers starting to program on ANY system where the Java JDK is installed. Almost all the programming examples found in this book are taken from 'real-life' situations. Among other useful skills, you will learn how to write: a small routine for randomly accessing a 1.000.000 record file in a few milliseconds, a real client server application using sockets, a 'pocket calculator' with 200 significant digits, and pull-down menus using curses.
• What are the covered topics?
  • Introduction to the NetRexx language
  • Numbers,Strings and Control Structures
  • Class and Methods
  • Operations on files, sockets and threads
  • Applets
  • Graphical User Interfaces
• Is this a User Guide, a Tutorial or a Reference Manual? The answer is "something of all these". In fact, the best definition is probably an "Advanced User Guide with Reference Sections". Previous programming experience is needed in order to fully understand this book, and thus it is NOT a user guide in the true sense of the term. However, I felt it necessary to include reference information for those users who might not have the NetRexx reference book readily available to them. Some chapters also needed amplification, since they describe functions not documented elsewhere.
• Where can I find the examples? All the examples used in this book are available on Internet via WWW at the URL:

   
  http://wwwcn.cern.ch/news/netrexx/examples
   
  

File: nr_1.html.

Last update was done on 18 May 1998 21:47:32(GMT +2).