Book excerpt: The 1986 IFAC/IFIP Workshop on real-time programming represents the 14th meeting of this workshop since it was first organized in 1971. Traditionally a meeting of a small number of experts, the papers presented at this meeting concentrate on the topics of real-time environment and executives, software development tools and languages, and special real-time applications. The continuing progress being made in this field of programming is amply reflected by the papers and should be of interest to anyone wishing to be kept up to date in the field.