AS/400 (iSeries) REXX Programming

Overview
A highly practical workshop showing how to use REXX within an AS/400 environment.

Practicals take place throughout the course and each attendee will have a PC.
Course objectives
The course is designed to provide a solid grounding in the REXX language within the AS/400.
By the end of this course you will have learned
REXX syntax, the concepts of variables, instructions, functions and host commands; how to use TRACE to interactively debug REXX code; how to perform arithmetic and control the scale of arithmetic values; how to write subroutines, procedures and functions; how to manage the stack; how to read and write files.

REXX instructions covered are - ADDRESS, ARG, CALL, DO, DROP, EXIT, IF, ITERATE, LEAVE, NOP, PARSE, PROCEDURE, PULL, PUSH, QUEUE, RETURN, SAY, SELECT, SIGNAL and UPPER. REXX built-in functions include - ABBREV, DATATYPE, DATE, FORMAT, LEFT, QUEUED, RANDOM, RIGHT, STRIP, SUBSTR and TIME.
Who should attend
Any IT staff who will be using REXX within an AS/400 environment.
Pre-requisites
AS/400 Introduction or equivalent experience. An understanding of programming concepts is desirable, but not mandatory.
Course synopsis

• Introduction to REXX
• Simple REXX programs

Syntax; variables; simple parsing; executing host commands; batch execution

• Selection

IF and SELECT instructions

• Iteration

DO instructions; introduction to stem variables

• Arithmetic

How to use REXX maths and handle the results

• Program design

How to code subroutines and functions

• REXX input/output

How to use the program stack and stem variables to hold file-based data; database file access