I’ve been thinking about getting into SAP for the last few years and often talked to my fellow guild members and brokers about it (I’m a contract programmer and brokers get me most of my jobs). The usual suggestion was to take a year off and spend a pile of money getting schooled, so I let things slide…
The light finally came on this afternoon and one google later, I found the SAP Developer Network website. Poking around, I found that free registration was required to access the training goodies, forums etc.
One registration and email confirmation later and I’m a brand-new SDN member. My first job is to learn the ABAP language used to program SAP, but I pick up programming languages like dogs pick up fleas; after all, what are command shells, awk, grep, sed and SQL but programming languages, in addition to the usual suspects like FORTRAN, COBOL, C, Python etc.?
There appears to be a download for Windows XP that will let me play around with ABAP, in which case I won’t need to get a SAP job first (which would probably be impossible). There also seems to be an opportunity to download some kind of SAP application to learn on, but it has SUSE Linux Enterprise Server from Novell as a prerequisite. (Dang! Just when I was getting excited about the BSDs…)
Note: ABAP is pronounced Ah-Bop by the cognoscenti because SAP comes from Germany. (If you really want to lay it on, say “zahp” instead of “sap”.) I did two years of German during one of my numerous forays into higher education and look forward to reading the SAP scriptures in the original language.
Anyway, what better for this mainframer than to get retreaded with SAP? I know it’s a big system to get your arms around, but I’ve been doing legacy maintenance on and off for twenty years so big systems don’t hold any particular terror for me.
As Fred Astaire sang in Top Hat:
I’m stepping out, my dear,
to breathe an atmosphere
that simply reeks with class,
and I hope that you
won’t mind my dust
when I step on the gas…