This document provides an overview of distributed systems and how to connect real-time applications using the Data Distribution Service (DDS) standard. It introduces DDS and its architecture, including topics, instances, keys, quality of service policies. It then demonstrates how to create a basic "hello world" publisher/subscriber example in both eProsima Fast RTPS and RTI Connext DDS middleware in 3 steps: defining the data type, generating code, and building/running the publisher and subscriber.