Markl has revised for publication ten lectures on deformation theory that he delivered to graduate students and professional mathematicians in Raleigh, North Carolina during May 2011. He focuses on deformations over local complete Noetherian rings, which covers most types of deformations of algebraic structures that working mathematicians meet in their professional life. Readers are assumed to have a basic knowledge of commutative algebra, homological algebra, and category theory. Among the topics are deformations and cohomology, the gauge group, strongly homotopy Lie algebras, and operads. Annotation ©2012 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)