
Preface
This book is intended as an introduction to concrete methods for working with
associative structures of all sorts, most notably commutative associative alge-
bras, noncommutative associative algebras, and operads. The first two are very
well known; the third is an algebraic device that captures properties exhibited
by substitutions of operations with several arguments into one another (and
of course these compositions of operations are associative). In each of these
cases, an object is often presented by generators and relations: commutative
associative algebras are quotients of algebras of commutative polynomials,
noncommutative associative