'Steel's monograph is a masterpiece in terms of both research and exposition. The reviewer ranks it amongst the most significant works in set theory, because of its fundamental advances and broadly applicable new methods. It is required reading for anyone wishing to get up to date on core model theory, and it leads to many beautiful open problems for research.' Ernest Schimmerling, Journal of Symbolic Logic
Introduction; 1. The construction of K^c; 2. Iterability; 3. Thick classes and universal weasels; 4. The hull and definability properties; 5. The construction of true K; 6. An inductive definition of K; 7. Some applications; 8. Embeddings of K; 9. A general iterability theorem; References; Index of definitions.