A four year-old book on a programming language once pronounced dead, has hit the Macmillan Computer Publishing top ten best seller list and reached an all time high sales record of more than 2,000 copies per month, with more than 6,000 orders already taken for a new edition due out next month. What is the book? ‘Teach yourself COBOL in 21 days’ by Mo Budlong, which is being snapped up by those hoping to make a quick buck sorting out the millennium date problem. While there has been much debate about how much use an entry level programmer would be, it seems veterans have conceded there are so many lines of code to search and correct, entry level programmers could do much of the donkey work, and free them up for the higher level fixing. With pots of money to be made in the next couple of years, Teach yourself COBOL in 21 days could become more of a must-have than Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People.
