CICS V4 Fundamentals

Course Description

In this 3-day, instructor-led, entry-level course, students learn about the basic concepts and facilities of IBM CICS Transaction Server V4. After completing this course, students have the prerequisite knowledge for all of the follow-on CICS application and systems programming courses offered by WebSphere Education.

CICS Transaction Server enables the execution of a complex application workload, and it also integrates with service-oriented architecture (SOA) enterprise solutions.

This course gives students a solid background in the transactions and application programming interfaces (APIs) that are supplied with CICS Transaction Server V4. Students learn about general guidelines and programming aids that support application development for CICS. Topics include the features of CICSPlex System Manager, working with the new graphical tooling provided by the CICS Explorer, how CICS protects its resources, and managing data integrity. In addition, students learn how to design and write CICS applications, and learn about the facilities that enable CICS to connect and communicate with other systems.

Hands-on exercises are designed to reinforce the lecture material, and give students practical experience working with the basics of CICS transaction processing and resource management. The exercises build skills in areas such as using the supplied transactions, defining and managing CICS resources, managing queues and files, and debugging CICS applications.

This course is applicable to all releases of CICS TS V4.

For information about other related WebSphere courses, visit the WebSphere Education Training Paths website:

http://www.ibm.com/software/websphere/education/paths/

Skills Gained

• Course introduction
• Introducing CICS
• CICS-supplied transactions
• Exercise: CICS-supplied transactions
• Defining CICS resources
• Exercise: Defining CICS resources
• Introducing the CICS Explorer
• Exercise: Using the CICS Explorer
• CICSPlex System Manager overview
• CICS security
• Managing data integrity
• Startup and shutdown
• Exercise: Managing CICS resources
• Data access
• Exercise: Managing files and queues
• Designing CICS applications
• Exercise: Reviewing CICS BMS maps
• Writing CICS programs
• Testing and debugging CICS programs
• Exercise: Debugging applications using CEDF
• CICS intercommunication
• Course summary

Who Can Benefit

This basic course is for IT personnel with little or no CICS experience.

Prerequisites

Students should have

• a basic knowledge of data processing and an IBM operating system.

Some programming experience in a high-level language like COBOL or Java is helpful.