Book excerpt: This book is based on a course taught to an audience of undergraduate and graduate students at Oxford, and can be viewed as a bridge between the study of metric spaces and general topological spaces. About half the book is devoted to relatively little-known results, much of which is published here for the first time. The author sketches a theory of uniform transformation groups, leading to the theory of uniform spaces over a base and hence to the theory of uniform covering spaces. Readers interested in general topology will find much to interest them here.