About this Course

The “System Programmer Boot camp ” is geared towards technical staff new to the CICS environment. In this course, the participant will learn how a CICS system is put together: resource definitions, system utilities both online and offline, System Initialization tables, CICS JCL, system datasets are subjects covered in depth in this course. We also discuss CICS storage management, CICS communications and CICS customization. The second week of this course is aimed at learning how to debug and support CICS applications. At the end of this class, the attendee will have been exposed to almost everything that goes on in a CICS address space.

Audience Profile

Anyone new to CICS System Programming.

At Course Completion

Upon successful completion of this course, the student will be able to:

• Define CICS resources with the proper attributes
• Code MVS/JCL required to guaranty proper CICS initialization
• Properly use the necessary CICS utilities to perform their duties
• Properly make use of CICS online function to monitor and manage CICS systems
• Build a CICS address space from scratch
• Understand System Initialization Table
• Provide an overview of the major facilities available in CICS
• Describe the various ways one can customize a CICS system
• Describe CICS Architecture and its major components
• Name the major control blocks used by CICS
• Understand the way a CICS transaction executes in a CICS environments
• Understand the Domain environment and describe the major components
• Understand CICS message processing and how this can be used to control the dump environment in CICS
• Use IPCS as a tool to effectively read CICS dumps and find the cause of a problem
• Analyze the various reports provided by the DFHPDxxx verb exit routine
• Understand CICS traces and use them as part of your debugging exercise
• Analyze most error situations in CICS using either a transaction or system dump

Prerequisites

Some knowledge of TSO/ISPF will help during some exercises.

Course Outline

• CICS Overview
• Resource Definition
• CICS System Preparation
• Externals
• Initialization & Shutdown
• CICS Storage
• CICS Communication
• Online Tools
• CICS Offline Utilities
• CICS Customization
• CICS/TS Architecture Review
• CICS/TS Externals
• CICS/TS Internals
• CICS/TS Dumps and Traces
• Problem Investigation