by Bruce Powel Douglass

From the Inside Flap (partial)

This book is meant to be a fusion of a number of subject domains almost universally left disjoint--real-time concepts such as timeliness and performance, object modeling, a rapid development process, and system safety. This unified approach allows the developer to follow simple and well-understood process steps culminating with the delivery of correct and timely embedded solutions.

There are very few books on using objects in real-time systems and even fewer that use the latest in object modeling languages--the UML. Virtually all object-oriented books focus primarily on business or data base application domains and do not mention real-time aspects at all. On the other hand, texts on real-time systems have largely ignored object-oriented methods. For the most part, such books fall into two primary camps: those that bypass methodological considerations altogether and focus solely on "bare metal" programming and those that are highly theoretical with little advice for actually implementing workable systems. Doing Hard Time is meant to bridge for these technologies, presenting the development of deployable real-time systems using the object semantics and notation of the UML. It does so in a tool-independent manner, even though it does use a particular tool to demonstrate the examples. Audience

The book is oriented towards the practicing professional software developer and the computer science major, in the junior year or higher. The book could serve as an undergraduate or graduate level text, but the focus is on practical development rather than a theoretical introduction. A few equations are to be found in this book, but more theoretical and mathematical approaches are referenced where appropriate. The book assumes a reasonable proficiency in at least one programming language and at least a cursory exposure to the fundamental concepts of both object orientation and real-time systems.

Addison-Wesley Pub Co
ISBN: 0201498375
1st edition (May 14, 1999)