NORWICH UNIVERSITY -- Fall 2005

IS353 Structured COBOL Programming
COURSE DESCRIPTION

M. E. Kabay, PhD, CISSP-ISSMP, Associate Professor of Information Assurance
Program Director, Master of Science in Information Assurance (MSIA)
Program Director, BSc in Information Assurance (BSIA)
School of Business & Management
 

This course provides an overview of fundamental principles and terminology of the programming language ANSI COBOL, which is primarily used to implement business systems. The student will study the syntax and details of the COBOL programming language. Programming exercises dealing with practical business applications will be assigned.  Prerequisites IS228 or permission of instructor.

1          EDUCATIONAL OBJECTIVES

  • Assimilate and practice industry-standard methodology for designing and writing good COBOL programs
  • Learn good problem-solving approaches that can be used with all programming languages

2          Mechanics

·                     Classes will meet from 13:00:05 to 14:14:55 every Monday in Dewey 106 and every Wednesday in Webb Computer Lab (WCL) from 13:00:05 to 13:59:55.  Prof Kabay will be at WCL at 12:45 for informal discussions.  Attendance is mandatory; a record of attendance will be kept.  Three unexcused absences will result in expulsion from the course.

·                     Textbook:  Structured COBOL Programming, Second Edition by Shelly, Cashman, & Foreman (ISBN 0-7895-5703-7).

·                     Additional readings will be provided on the course Web pages and in class handouts.

·                     There will be no grading on a curve.  There are no predetermined numbers of A, B and other grades.  If everyone gets an A the instructor will be delighted.

·                     All exams will be closed-book. 

·                     Students are encouraged to collaborate during preparation for the exams and in labs.  However, every submission of a lab must be the student’s own personal work.  No source code may be copied from one student to another.  Plagiarism will be severely prosecuted. 

·                     Students may not collaborate during quizzes or in the final exam.

2.1         Quizzes: 25% of final grade

The course will have five in-class quizzes based on the assigned readings since the last quiz  (except the first quiz, which covers material from the start of the course).

·                     These are closed-book quizzes in which students are not permitted to use reference materials.

·                     The quiz will last 20 minutes. 

·                     Each quiz will have a mixture of short-answer and multiple-choice questions and all questions must be answered.

·                     Dates and coverage of all quizzes are marked on the class syllabus.

2.2         Final exam: 25% of final grade

2.3         Lab assignments: 50% of final grade

Students must complete assignments listed in the course syllabus.  These are usually started on each Wednesday in the lab and must be turned in by the next Wednesday at the start of the lab period.

2.4         Extra-credit (optional) assignments

Additional assignments are available every week for students wishing to increase their knowledge and their grades.  These assignments are granted half the value of the required assignments and the credits are added to the total accumulation of points for the lab work.  The total may thus exceed 50% points and the maximum grade in the course may exceed 100%.

3          More than You Wanted to Know About the Instructor: 
M. E. Kabay, PhD, CISSP-ISSMPmekabay@gmail.com / Tel. (802) 479-7937 / Dewey 209

M. Kabay began learning assembler at age 15 and had learned FORTRAN IV G at McGill University by 1966. In 1976, he received his PhD from Dartmouth College in applied statistics and invertebrate zoology.  Until 1979, he was a university professor in applied statistics. In 1979, he joined a compiler team for a new 4GL and RDBMS in the U.S., being responsible for developing the statistical syntax, writing the parser, error traps and code generation for statistical functions in the command language; the object language was structured COBOL  Kabay joined Hewlett-Packard in 1980 and became a performance specialist, winning the Systems Engineer of the Year Award in 1982.  After a few years working in a large service bureau as operations manager, he formed his own company in 1986.  Kabay has specialized in consulting and training for systems performance, systems operations, and systems security.  He has written security columns for Computer World, Network World, Computing Canada, Secure Computing Magazine, NCSA News, Information Security Magazine and several other trade magazines.  He attained the status of Certified Systems Security Professional (CISSP) in 1997.

Dr Kabay has published over 850 technical papers in operations management and security.  He currently writes two columns a week for Network World Fusion; archives are at < http://www.networkworld.com/newsletters/sec/ >.  He won the Best Paper Award at the 16th National Computer Security Conference in 1993 for his submission, Social Psychology and INFOSEC: Psycho-social Factors in the Implementation of Information Security Policy.  He completed a college textbook, The NCSA Guide to Enterprise Security: Protecting Information Assets (ISBN 0-07-033147-2), published by McGraw-Hill in April 1996.  He was the technical editor of The Computer Security Handbook, 4th Edition published by Wiley in 2002 and is currently working on the 5th edition.

Kabay led the International Delegation of Computer Security Experts to China organized by the Citizen Ambassador Program in April 1994.  He was the Program Chair for the First and Second International Conferences on Information Warfare in Montreal in 1993 and 1995 and was the organizer of the ICSA Symposia: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Information Security at the National Information Systems Security Conferences.  Kabay was invited to lecture yearly on computer security at the U.S. Army War College and to the chiefs of the counter-intelligence services of NATO in Germany in 1995.  He was invited to a meeting of the President’s Commission on Critical Infrastructure Protection in Washington in 1997 and was invited to address INFOSEC specialists at NATO HQ in Brussels in March 2000.  He serves as the program chair for the annual e-ProtectIT Conference at Norwich University.

Kabay was Director of Education for the National Computer Security Association (later ICSA and then TruSecure) from 1991 to January 2000.  He was Security Leader for the INFOSEC Group of AtomicTangerine, Inc. from January 2000 to June 2001 and joined the faculty at Norwich University as Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Information Systems  in July 2001.  His special areas of research are INFOSEC policy, education and awareness; INFOWAR; and cyberspace law.  In January 2002 he was appointed program director of the new Master of Science in Information Assurance program in the Online Graduate Programs at Norwich.  In January 2004 he was appointed program director of the new Bachelor of Science in Information Assurance at Norwich and also took on new duties as the Chief Technical Officer for the Online Graduate Programs of Norwich University.

Prof Kabay’s Web site is < http://www.mekabay.com/ >.

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