Real-time and embedded systems developers face unique challenges. The systems they design must use very limited processor and memory resources optimally to meet mission-critical and high reliability requirements. Developers working on these systems see the same common threads in problems again and again. The very best developers abstract these problems and their solutions into generalized approaches that prove consistently effective: design patterns. In this book, real-time programming guru Bruce Powel Douglass collects the best design patterns from this unique, and rapidly growing, area of programming, and presents them in an instructional format that teaches the reader the "what, when, and how" of leveraging the significant power of these proven design solutions.