SAS Programming on Mainframe

[mdieckman]

I'm a PC SAS programmer, but I've been asked to learn Mainframe using JCL / TSO. I was wondering if there were any resources or guides someone could point me to so I could get started. I'm kind of wading my way through here blindly and have some program examples, but I think it would be helpful if I had some documentation (or anything) that could help me understand this better!

Thanks in advance!

 

[ChrisW75]

Hiya,
Sorry, I can't help on the documentation, however just to give you some encouragement, it's not too bad working on the mainframe, although it does require a bit of a mental gear change. I originally learnt on the mainframe, and haven't used it in maybe 9 years, however, from memory there isn't really that much that is different.
JCL is something that practically no one knows how to write from scratch, I think everyone copies scripts that are already in existence and modifies them to suit their needs. Editing in ISPF brings a few challenges, but can give you some interesting new skills which can also be used in PC-SAS, namely line control commands. These are used for copying and pasting in the editor window and are entered over the tops of the line numbers. You can do this in the standard program editor (as opposed to the Enhanced Program Editor) on PC SAS as well.
Good luck.

Chris
Business Analyst, Code Monkey, Data Wrangler.
SAS Guru.

 

[mdieckman]

Thanks for the reply... I did figure out what I needed to do before you replied.

Did find a fairly good resource though... too bad these forums aren't as busy as they used to be...

http://ibmmainframes.com/