Workshop – IBM i – Learn RPG Programming for Beginners 

RPG Programming for Beginners

• If you are a complete programming noob then this RPG Programming course might be useful
• If you are a software developer looking to add RPG (or RPGLE) to your skillset then this might not be completely useless
• If you are an old school RPG programmer looking to add some modern programming style to your skillset then this might be humorous

Hopefully anyway 🙂

If there was a quick and easy solution to “how to quickly become a productive RPG IV and ILE programmer” then all of us old AS400, iSeries, and IBM I developers would have gobbled up that solution in double-quick time.

Upgrading your programming skills from RPG OPM (Original Programming Model) to RPG ILE (Integrated Language Environment) can seem daunting.

But, it really is much easier than it seems.

Modern RPG is just old RPG with some bells and whistles – if you know old style RPG then you already have the building blocks to expand into the shiny modern world of ILE RPG.

So, if you are an experienced legacy RPG Programmer but havent kept abreast with the huge changes to RPG over recent years, dont be put off. It’s not as daunting as it seems. You can easily become more familiar with ILE RPG (also confusingly called RPG4, RPG5 or RPG /Free) just by running older RPG source through IBM’s CVTRPGSRC command.

Comparing the new source members with the originals lets you easily compare the source code layouts and the general formatting differences. For 99.9% of source members, the resulting source should compile as a program that works the same as the original.

Let’s start with an easy example of taking a very simple (4 line) RPG/2 program and modernizing it through RPG3, through RPG400 and ending in RPGLE /Freeformat