Chapter 1. Basic notions
Chapter 2. Deformations and cohomology
Chapter 3. Finer structures of cohomology
Chapter 4. The gauge group
Chapter 5. The simplicial Maurer-Cartan space
Chapter 6. Strongly homotopy Lie algebras
Chapter 7. Homotopy invariance and quantization
Chapter 8. Brief introduction to operads
Chapter 9. L∞-algebras governing deformations
Chapter 10. Examples

This book brings together both the classical and current aspects of deformation theory. The presentation is mostly self-contained, assuming only basic knowledge of commutative algebra, homological algebra and category theory. In the interest of readability, some technically complicated proofs have been omitted when a suitable reference was available. The relation between the uniform continuity of algebraic maps and topologized tensor products is explained in detail, however, as this subject does not seem to be commonly known and the literature is scarce. ---summary provided by publisher