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Rating: 
Summary: Worthless book-- don't buy it
Review: I am VERY VERY disappointed that IEEE publishes this book. IEEE usually has very high standard in publishing books under its name. However, it does not happen in this book. I have no clue why IEEE decides to publish this book. This book has a collection of VERY superficial knowledge that you can find from all entry level undergraduate books. It does not help engineers AT ALL as the book title claims. It misses LOTS of important real-time theories. Some theories mentioned in the book are either too superficial or even incorrect. As another reviewer states, the most important and widely used real-time scheduling theory, the rate-monotonic, is mentioned in the book by ONE single sentence. Can you believe this book is a real-time system book? Again, I am very disappointed this book get published. All my classmates believed this book is terribly BAD and we told our instructor. Don't spend your money on this expensive and useless book. If you want to know the practical aspect of real-time systems, check Mr. Simon's book "An Embedded Software Primer". All my classmates love this book. If you want to know the theory aspect of real-time systems, check Dr. Jane Liu's "Real-Time Systems" book published in 2000.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent book, not certain it is worth the price
Review: I think that this is an excellent introductory book that covers a broad range of items related to Real Time Systems. Unfortunately, I am not sure that it warrants the steep price.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent book, not certain it is worth the price
Review: I think that this is an excellent introductory book that covers a broad range of items related to Real Time Systems. Unfortunately, I am not sure that it warrants the steep price.
Rating: 
Summary: Why buy this book?
Review: It's amazing that despite this book's success as the leading text on Real-Time Systems in both the College Text and Professional markets with over 15,000 sold, that it is still derided by many. Perhaps this is because the notion of real-time systems itself is so badly misunderstood. This book is an introductory book about real-time systems. It is intended not as a cookbook, but to cause the reader to begin thinking about hardware and software in a different way. It is necessarily broad and not very deep. It is a survey book, designed to heighten the reader's awareness and cause him or her to look for answers elsewhere. Experienced real-time designers will be disappointed by this book unless they are looking for a codification of what they already know. Novices will be disappointed if they think they can read it and then build a real-time kernel the next day. To think as much would be to diminish the depth of thinking required in the design of real-time systems. But the book, although apparently simplistic, is subtly complex. Consider the semaphore primitives. They can be written with a handful of code. Yet they are fraught with danger for the real-time designer. In the same way, this book has a kind of zen-like simplicity and complexity. A yin and yang. I didn't really intend it to be that way, but apparently, that's how it came out -- at least that is what I have been told. For those who don't appreciate this book, I understand. I suggest that you read the many other good books on Real-Time systems that I refer to in my own text. You will be surprised at what you might discover. Thanks for considering my book.
Rating: 
Summary: Too cursory except as a text book
Review: The preface to this book says it is suitable for a college student or an engineer trying to get up to speed with real time systems. The latter is nonsense. It may work for a college course where a skilled instructor is adding material but it is far too cursory to apply. The first 6 chapters are basic material for any curriculum on programming. The chapters that follow mention difficulties but give no techniques that can be applied. Nothing in this would enable a person, previous unprepared to do so, to write a real time system. This book says it eschews mathematical formalism for practical utility. What it lacks is both a formal foundation and practical utility. The exercises (completely without sample answers) are terribly thought out. The description of difficulties of real time job scheduling are a list of known problems and some references to other papers. Sample code included is too specific to be general, and too general to be directly applicable.
Rating:
Summary: Expensive and Cursory but Readable
Review: There's not enough material to warrant the price. The book is easy to read, but the author repeats himself far too much. As justus@acm.org notes, the book is full of of filler sentences, paragraphs, and chapters. The title of the book seems incorrect, since the real-time portion of the book is skimpy. Rate-monotonic analysis, synonomous with real-time in academia, is only given a sentence. Ada, "the" real-time programming language, is barely mentioned. While Ada's pros and cons can be debated, it is almost completely skipped. On the other hand, software engineering practices, design methodologies, and testing have their own chapters. I didn't hate the book, but felt cheated after paying [the money].
Rating:
Summary: Expensive and Cursory but Readable
Review: This book has been a waste of my time. Its only saving grace has been that I read it quickly. It presents a totally superficial and biased overview of some concepts that touch on real-time systems. This was the first real-time'ish book I ever picked up and I _still_ didn't learn anything from it. It is full of filler sentences like "If the task-control block model is used, then a list of task-control blocks is kept." If you are looking for a primer or introduction to real-time then keep looking -- I sure am....
Rating:
Summary: I feel like I have wasted my time.
Review: This book has been a waste of my time. Its only saving grace has been that I read it quickly. It presents a totally superficial and biased overview of some concepts that touch on real-time systems. This was the first real-time'ish book I ever picked up and I _still_ didn't learn anything from it. It is full of filler sentences like "If the task-control block model is used, then a list of task-control blocks is kept." If you are looking for a primer or introduction to real-time then keep looking -- I sure am....
Rating:
Summary: Excellent book for real-world applications
Review: This book has the right mix of theory and practical information to be useful to engineers that are getting involved in complex real time systems. I bought this book for my department, and all the new hires are required to read it. It covers topics essential to real time systems development.
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