This famous book was the first treatise on Lie groups in which a modern point of view was adopted systematically, namely, that a continuous group can be regarded as a global object. To develop this idea to its fullest extent, Chevalley incorporated a broad range of topics, such as the covering spaces of topological spaces, analytic manifolds, integration of complete systems of differential equations on a manifold, and the calculus of exterior differential forms.

The book opens with a short description of the classical groups: unitary groups, orthogonal groups, symplectic groups,...