The present book grew out of introductory lectures on the theory offunctions of several variables. Its intent is to make the reader familiar, by the discussion of examples and special cases, with the most important branches and methods of this theory, among them, e.g., the problems of holomorphic continuation, the algebraic treatment of power series, sheaf and cohomology theory, and the real methods which stem from elliptic partial differential equations. In the first chapter we begin with the definition of holomorphic functions of several variables, their representation by the Cauchy...