the book offers a sound, easily readable theoretical back- ground for dependability prediction and analysis of enginee- ring systems. the book bridges the gap between the real life dependability problems and very sophisticated and highly specialized books in this field. it is addressed to a broad readership including practicing engineers, reliability ana- lysts and postgraduate students of engineering faculties. the professionals in the field may also find some new mate- rial that is not covered in available textbooks such as fuz- zy logic evaluation of dependability performance, uncertain- ty assessment, open loop sequential analysis of discrete state stochastic processes, approximate solving of markov systems.