This book is a practical, hands-on guide to COBOL code optimization. It provides basic principles and techniques for writing efficient, high-level COBOL programs. The book assumes that you are an experienced programmer and want to learn how to develop high performance applications using the latest tools and techniques. The book is also a practical guide to developing high performance applications by optimizing both COBOL code and the application. The book targets IT professionals who are responsible for the day-to-day development and maintenance of business applications written in COBOL. The book introduces essential concepts of performance analysis and optimization. It also covers many tools and techniques including some advanced techniques such as parallelization, multiprocessing, virtual machines, and XML parsing. With the help of hands-on examples, real world case studies, process maps and a full-scale application, this book teaches professionals and students alike how to build high performance applications using the latest techniques for optimizing COBOL code using safe hooks provided by COBOL compilers as well as unit testing services. The book features: - Introduction to COBOL - Planning data set design - Visualizing the data set with a break down matrix - Creating the conditional statements - Introduction to loops and looping language constructs - Introduction to arrays and additional operations of an array And much more. This book will teach programmers how to identify and eliminate redundant code with COBOL code optimization techniques. It includes high-level, simple to understand illustrations on program design, programming principles, data structures, debugging techniques and provides a complete overview of COBOL programming language. If you truly see yourself as a coding enthusiast, then this is the book for you. Even if you're a newcomer to coding, this book will make you an expert in COBOL code optimization, and help you diminish many of the painful effects of repeated errors from careless errors.