The main aim of this book is the study of locally compact groups from a geometric perspective, with an emphasis on appropriate metrics that can be defined on them. The approach has been successful for finitely generated groups and can be favorably extended to locally compact groups.

Parts of the book address the coarse geometry of metric spaces, where “coarse” refers to that part of geometry concerning properties that can be formulated in terms of large distances only. This point of view is instrumental in studying locally compact groups. Basic results in the subject are exposed with complete proofs; others are stated with appropriate references. Most importantly, the development of the theory is illustrated by numerous examples, including matrix groups with entries in the the field of real or complex numbers, or other locally compact fields such as \(p\)-adic fields, isometry groups of various metric spaces, and last but not least, discrete groups themselves.

The book is aimed at graduate students, advanced undergraduate students, and mathematicians seeking some introduction to coarse geometry and locally compact groups.