MVSFORUMS.com

[rahul780]

hi all;

i want pdf of this book Murach's CICS Desk Reference by doug lowe
can its avalabale on internate or i have to parches it

regards

[semigeezer]

Murach is a commercial outfit. Buy the book.

In addition to the honesty factor and ethics in general, the market for mainframe publications is small enough that if those who need the books won't buy them, there will be none to buy. Then, for things not in available manuals, you'll need to rely on a few bulletin boards (on which the answers seem to be correct only about 10%-40% of the time, depending on the board). Sometimes you'll find web sites that inadvertently leak licensed manuals to the web, or some unethical slob illegally selling a CD with licensed manuals or software, but they do no one any favors.
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[warp5]

Well, at least your (semigeezer) answers have a much better percentage than 10% to 40%. Do you really find the answers that bad? My impression was that sometimes there were wrong answers in a thread, but that the thread usually corrected those answers as time progressed. So many of the answers are just good guesses because the question posted is so vague and unspecific that you can only guess what the questioner wants to know.

[semigeezer]

I think the threads do get better too, as I mentioned. This board is much better than it used to be. The *help one used to be more accurate but they are now similar and this one gets more traffic. The 'experts' one is, with the exception of answers from about 4 or 5 very helpful, if overworked people (you know who you are ) is completely hopeless, though fun to read (like a Fellini film -- you can't understand where some of this stuff comes from, but it is engaging).

I do think as a group, the boards are less than 50% correct, if you consider the number of posts that are answered with "I've never had to do that so it must not be a legitimate question", "I think what you should be asking is ...", "this is hypothetical so why would you want to know this", and the answers that cover only a tiny aspect of the question, or give a solution that solves the problem but in a grossly inefficient or convoluted way. Then there are admittedly very minor errors like all the posts that claim that IEFBR14 does something or requires //SYSOUT or //SYSPRINT or is needed before other steps. These are minor, nitpicky errors, but they do cause people to misunderstand basic concepts like how allocation works in JCL.

I appreciate the sentiment that my answers are good, but I've gotten myself in trouble many times here too trying to give details that I didn't verify. I'm not sure my answers are that reliable either. I don't hold myself as an example of a good responder, especially in comparison to some others here and elsewhere. I'd like to think my posts are reasoned, but sometimes, I reread them and realize I really went off the rails. Like this post, perhaps.
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New members are encouraged to read the How To Ask Questions The Smart Way FAQ at http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html.