A First Course in Group Theory

One of the difficulties in an introductory book is to communicate a sense of purpose. Only too easily to the beginner does the book become a sequence of definitions, concepts, and results which seem little more than curiousities leading nowhere in particular. In this book I have tried to overcome this problem by making my central aim the determination of all possible groups of orders 1 to 15, together with some study of their structure. By the time this aim is realised towards the end of th...