Book excerpt: This book presents a comprehensive overview of the recently developed L1 adaptive control theory, including detailed proofs of the main results. The key feature of the L1 adaptive control theory is the decoupling of adaptation from robustness. The architectures of L1 adaptive control theory have guaranteed transient performance and robustness in the presence of fast adaptation, without enforcing persistent excitation, applying gain-scheduling, or resorting to high-gain feedback.