Book excerpt: The main purpose of the book is to present, at a graduate level and in a self-contained way, the most important aspects of the theory of continuous stochastic processes in continuous time and to introduce some of its ramifications such as the theory of semigroups, the Malliavin calculus, and the Lyons' rough paths. This book is intended for students, or even researchers, who wish to learn the basics in a concise but complete and rigorous manner. Several exercises are distributed throughout the text to test the understanding of the reader and each chapter ends with bibliographic comments aimed at those interested in exploring the materials further. Stochastic calculus was developed in the 1950s and the range of its applications is huge and still growing today. Besides being a fundamental component of modern probability theory, domains of applications include but are not limited to: mathematical finance, biology, physics, and engineering sciences. The first part of the text is devoted to the general theory of stochastic processes. The author focuses on the existence and regularity results for processes and on the theory of martingales. This allows him to introduce the Brownian motion quickly and study its most fundamental properties. The second part deals with the study of Markov processes, in particular, diffusions. The author's goal is to stress the connections between these processes and the theory of evolution semigroups. The third part deals with stochastic integrals, stochastic differential equations and Malliavin calculus. In the fourth and final part, the author presents an introduction to the very new theory of rough paths by Terry Lyons.