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Reviewer: Dimitrios Katsaros

Real-time computing applications have undoubtedly become a part of everyday life, ranging from railway switching systems, to telecommunications, to air traffic control, and so on. Despite the significance of these applications, there are not many books that cover their respective issues, using a clear and comprehensive scientific methodology. This book fills the gap, explaining basic scheduling algorithms for applications that require predictable scheduling. It represents the fruit of a 15-year research career. The book contains 11 chapters. The first two present necessary background material, so the reader needs no prior knowledge to grasp the remaining chapters. Later chapters cover aperiodic task scheduling with explicit deadlines (chapter 3), periodic task scheduling (chapter 4), and the mixing of aperiodic and periodic task scheduling (chapters 5 and 6). The text then goes on to study handling tasks with precedence relations and access protocols for shared resources (chapter 7), the handling of overload conditions (chapter 8), and asynchronous communication mechanisms (chapter 9). The final two chapters investigate important issues and case studies related to the design of real-time applications and operating systems. The target audience for the book, mainly advanced undergraduate or postgraduate students, will benefit from the large number of illustrations, and the exercises that accompany each chapter. The exercises will be very helpful when digesting the chapter's material, and in testing understanding. The bibliographic references are appropriate and adequate, though a slight bias toward the author's research interests can be seen. Overall, the book is an excellent introductory textbook for predictable scheduling in hard real-time computing systems, combining the right balance of theory and practice. Online Computing Reviews Service