CICS V5.3 Fundamentals

In this comprehensive course, you learn about all the concepts and facilities of IBM CICS Transaction Server V5.3. After completing this course, you have the prerequisite knowledge for all of the follow-on CICS courses that IBM Training offers. This course gives you a solid background in the transactions and application programming interfaces (APIs) that are supplied with CICS. You learn about general guidelines and programming aids that support application development for CICS, including the features of CICSPlex System Manager, working with the CICS Explorer graphical tools, how CICS protects its resources, and managing data integrity. You also learn about the facilities that enable CICS to connect and communicate with other systems, and how to design and write CICS applications. Hands-on exercises throughout the course are designed to reinforce the lecture material, and give you practical experience in working with the basics of CICS transaction processing and resource management. The exercises build skills in areas such as using the supplied transactions and the CICS Explorer, defining and managing CICS resources, CICS web services and interfaces, and debugging CICS applications. This course is applicable to all releases of CICS TS and includes the related Version 5 updates for CICS TS V5.2 and CICS TS V5.3.

After completing this course, students will be able to:

• Describe the role of CICS in a business transaction environment and its support for modern interfaces
• Identify the major business advantages of CICS TS V5.3
• Outline the flow of a typical CICS transaction
• Describe the functions that the primary CICS supplied transactions perform
• Use the CICS master terminal transaction (CEMT) to query and control system resources
• Describe various ways of defining resources in CICS
• Use transactions that CICS supplies to define and manage resources
• Explain how CICS stores and manages resource definitions
• Describe the features, advantages, and use of the CICS and z/OS Explorer
• Use the CICS Explorer to connect, navigate, and manage resources
• List the CICS recoverable resources and how they provide data integrity

1. Course introduction
2. Introducing CICS
3. CICS supplied transactions
4. Exercise: CICS supplied transactions
5. Defining CICS resources
6. Exercise: Defining CICS resources
7. Introducing the CICS Explorer
8. Exercise: Using the CICS Explorer
9. Managing data integrity
10. Data access
11. Exercise: Exploring data resources
12. CICS security
13. Startup and shutdown
14. Exercise: Managing CICS resources
15. CICSPlex System Management overview
16. Designing CICS applications
17. Exercise: Exploring CICS web services
18. Writing CICS programs
19. Exercise: Reviewing CICS BMS maps
20. Testing and debugging CICS programs
21. Exercise: Debugging applications with EDF
22. CICS intercommunication
23. Course summary