🚀 go-pugleaf

>Every book he hAf seen
>so far starts off by explaining what a computer is ...
>So the $64,000 question is:  Are there any Cobol texts that are
>NOT written for programming novices?  Thanks a lot,

I consider myself to be an experienced COBOL programmer.  I might 
suggest that your friend look at what it is he really wants from
a COBOL text.   

In my opinion, the most important part of any language manual (and the
part most often missing) is examples.   The best text I have seen
for the number of examples is Grauer and Crawford's  

	  COBOL
	  A Pragmatic Approach

I don't want to flame your friend, but does it really matter if the 
first two chapters explain computers and data processing?   Is it all 
that hard to simply skip them?   This book has so many clear examples 
that you can (and I did for 2 years) program by simply copying portions 
of the examples into your program(especially on table-handling, which is
not clear or easy in COBOL).

Also, the section on IBM punch cards and JCL (which may be gone from more
recent editions) is interesting history of COBOL and data processing.
(to each his own, I guess)

Hope this helps!