The book deals with the (elementary and introductory) theory of valuation rings. As explained in the introduction, this represents a useful and important viewpoint in algebraic geometry, especially concerning the theory of algebraic curves and their function fields. The correspondences of this with other viewpoints (e.g. of geometrical or topological nature) are often indicated, also to provide motivations and intuition for many results. Links with arithmetic are also often indicated. There are three appendices, concerning Hilbert s Nullstellensatz (for which several proofs are provided),...