Book excerpt: Introduction to real-time systems - Designing real-time systems - Programming in the small - Programming in the large - Reliability and fault tolerance - Exceptions and exception handling - Concurrent programming - Shared variable-based synchronization and communication - Message-based synchronization and communication - Atomic actions, concurrent processes and reliability - Resource control - Real-time facilities - Scheduling - Distributed systems - Low-level programming - The execution environment - A case study in ada.