Book excerpt: This book provides a comprehensive treatment of intensity dependent particle beam instabilities in accelerating rings. Written for researchers, the material is also suitable for use as a textbook in an advanced graduate course for students studying accelerator physics.The presentation starts with a brief review of the basic concept of wake potentials and coupling impedances in the vacuum chamber followed by a discussion on static and dynamic solutions of their effects on the particle beams. Special emphasis is placed separately on proton and electron machines. Other special topics of interest covered include Landau damping, Balakin-Novokhatsky-Smirnov damping, Sacherer's integral equations, Landau cavity, saw-tooth instability, Robinson stability criteria, beam loading, transition crossing, two-stream instabilities, and collective instability issues of isochronous rings. After the formulation of an instability, readers are provided a thorough description of one or more experimental observations together with a discussion of the cures for the instability.Although the book is theory oriented, the use of mathematics has been minimized. The presentation is intended to be rigorous and self-contained with nearly all the formulas and equations derived.