Preface, What this book is about, Who this book is for – IBM Transaction Server OS User Manual

Page 11: What you need to know to understand this book, How to use this book, Determining if a publication is current

Preface

What this book is about

This book describes the affinity utility program. It explains what the utility does,
how to install it, and how to run the various components of the utility.

Who this book is for

This book is for CICS system programmers who may be planning to use CICS
dynamic routing for workload balancing, and need to determine whether any of the
transactions in their CICS applications use programming techniques that cause
inter-transaction affinity. It can also be used by application programmers to detect
whether application programs they are developing are likely to cause
inter-transaction affinity.

In particular, this book is of interest to CICS system programmers who are planning
to use the CICSPlex®SM element of CICS Transaction Server for OS/390 Release
3 for workload balancing. For more information about CICSPlex SM, see the
CICSPlex SM Concepts and Planning manual.

It is also of use if you are planning to implement asynchronous processing using
CICS function shipping or are planning to use the CICS transaction isolation facility.

What you need to know to understand this book

You need to be familiar with the CICS application programming interface (API) and
the various programming techniques available to CICS application programmers. In
particular, you should be familiar with those techniques that CICS application
programs can use to pass data from one to another, such as sharing common
storage, and techniques to synchronize their execution.

“Chapter 1. Introducing transaction affinities” on page 1 gives a brief introduction to
the inter-transaction affinity that can be caused by some of these techniques. For a
full discussion of transaction affinities, see the

CICS Application Programming

Guide.

How to use this book

This book is intended to be read sequentially, so that you understand how to:

1. Install the affinity utility

2. Run the separate components

Later, when you are familiar with the utility, you need only refer to the chapter
dealing with the particular component that you want to run.

Determining if a publication is current

IBM regularly updates its publications with new and changed information. When first
published, both hardcopy and BookManager softcopy versions of a publication are