Book excerpt: Since 1975, a short course entitled "System Safety and Reliability Analysis" has been presented to over 200 NRC personnel and contractors. The course has been taught jointly by David F. Haasl, Institute of System Sciences, Professor Norman H. Roberts, University of Washington, and 'members of the Probabilistic Analysis Staff, NRC, as part of a risk assessment training program sponsored by the Probabilistic Analysis Staff. This handbook has been developed not only to serve as text for the System Safety and Reliability Course, but also to make available to others a set of otherwise undocumented material on fault tree construction and evaluation. The publication of this handbook is in accordance with the recommendations of the Risk Assessment Review Group Report (NUREG/CR-0400) in which it was stated that the fault/event tree methodology both can and should be used more widely by the NRC. It is hoped that this document will help to codify and systematize the fault tree approach to systems analysis.