This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Rewriting Techniques and Applications, RTA 2006, held in Seattle, WA, USA in August 2006. The book presents 23 revised full papers and 4 systems description papers together with 2 invited talks and a plenary talk of the hosting FLoC conference. Topics include equational reasoning, system verification, lambda calculus, theorem proving, system descriptions, termination, higher-order rewriting and unification, and more.