Giandomenico Boffi, a graduate of the Università "La Sapienza" (Roma), received his Ph.D. from Brandeis University (Waltham, MA). He is currently Professor of Algebra at the Università "G. d'Annunzio" (Chieti-Pescara). He has published articles on commutative algebra and representation theory.; David A. Buchsbaum, a graduate of Columbia College (New York), received his Ph. D. from Columbia University. He is Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at Brandeis University (Waltham, MA). His publications include articles on category theory, commutative algebra, homological algebra and representation theory as well as a graduate text in algebra. He was also an algebra editor for the Transactions of the Amer. Math. Soc. and a founding editor of the Journal of Algebra. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, he is also a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

• Preface ; 1. Recollections and perspectives ; 2. Local ring theory ; 3. Generalized Koszul complexes ; 4. Structure theorems for finite free resolutions ; 5. Exactness criteria at work ; 6. Weyl and Schur modules ; 7. Some applications of Weyl and Schur modules ; Appendix for letter-place methods ; References ; Index