This book is the culmination of more than 20 years of building, studying, and teaching real-time systems. The author’s travels have taken him to NASA, UPS, Lockheed Martin, the Canadian and Australian Defense Forces, MIT’s Charles Stark Draper Labs, and many other places. These visits and interactions with literally hundreds of students from such places as Boeing, Motorola, and Siemens have resulted in a wider understanding of real-time systems and particularly their real application. This book is, in essence, a compendium of these experiences. The author’s intent is to provide a practical framework for software engineers to design and implement real-time systems. This approach is somewhat different from that of other texts on the subject.