My efforts to learn COBOL are picking up steam! I have completed the last two programming challenges and have an idea for a final project. I should complete book and course before Summer is over, and then begin the to turn my skills into a second life as a programmer.
I realize one reason I am making progress is I have base code to look at. If the exercises in both my book and the online course are any indication, COBOL is mainly a report generation language. Data is taken from one file, processed, and output into another file. I have completed at least one challenge by taking a program for one set of data, changing it to match the new data and making sure I haven't introduced any compile time errors or gotten tripped up by COBOL syntax.
I am sure that most of the work in COBOL now is more maintenance of code as well. I may be positioning myself for what my future tasks may be.