Book excerpt: The material in this volume was presented in a second-year graduate course at Tulane University, during the academic year 1958-1959. The book aims at being largely self-contained, but it is assumed that the reader has some familiarity with sets, mappings, groups, and lattices. Only in Chapter 5 will more preliminary knowledge be required, and even there the classical definitions and theorems on the matrix representations of algebras and groups are summarized.