Book excerpt: This book represents a comprehensive overview of the present state of progress in three related areas of combinatorics. It comprises selected papers from a conference held at the University of Montreal. Topics covered in the articles include association schemes, extremal problems, combinatorial geometrics and matroids, and designs. All the papers contain new results and many are extensive surveys of particular areas of research. Particularly valuable will be Ivanov's paper on recent Soviet research in these areas. Consequently this volume will be of great attraction to all researchers in combinatorics and to research students requiring a rapid introduction to some of the open problems in the subject.