Book excerpt: This book presents a short, fairly simple course on the basic theory of phase transitions and its modern applications. In physics, these applications include such modern developments as Bose-Einstein condensation of atoms, high temperature superconductivity, and vortices in superconductors, while in other fields they include small world phenomena and scale-free systems (such as stock markets and the Internet). The advantage of treating all these topics together lies in showing their connection with one another and with the general theory of phase transitions.