Book excerpt: Real-time functionality is essential for developing many consumer, industrial, and systems devices. While the C/C++ programming language is most often used in the creation of real-time software, the Java language, with its simple and familiar object-oriented programming model, offers many advantages over current real-time practices. Concurrent and Real-Time Programming in Java covers the motivations for, and semantics of, the extensions and modifications to the Java programming environment that enable the Java platform (Virtual Machine) to meet the requirements and constraints of real-time development. Key aspects of concurrent and real-time programming and how they are implemented in Java are discussed, such as concurrency, memory management, real-time scheduling, and real-time resource sharing.