I don't really know of any good general resources; they're often pegged to a specific programming language because the ways in which you have to achieve real-ti

I don't really know of any good general resources; they're often pegged to a specific programming language because the ways in which you have to achieve real-time compatibility differ depending on how the language and its runtime behave. We do all of our work in Java, which is definitely not a great candidate for real-time in most cases, so a lot of what I've learned about real-time programming has come from having to wrangle the JVM in to doing what we need it to do. The fields that come to mind when I think of real-time outside of HFT, though, are control systems and digital signal processing (DSP). While DSP doesn't necessarily need to be real-time if you're doing it for analysis, doing DSP live definitely requires real-time programming knowledge since signals are often expressed in the time domain and any delay in computation of a discrete element will propagate in how the signal is interpreted. For example, if the signal you're processing is a sound signal (like music), and you are doing software-based DSP on the signal before it reaches the playback device, it better be real-time or any delay spikes will ruin the playback. This is why OS X is so popular with the music industry and especially DJ's; the Mach kernel has really good real-time support and a pretty good real-time software based DSP library for building apps.