This text is a monograph on algebra, with connections to geometry and low-dimensional topology. It mainly involves groups, monoids, and categories, and aims to provide a unified treatment for those situations in which one can find distinguished decompositions by iteratively extracting a maximal fragment lying in a prescribed family. Initiated in 1969 by F. A. Garside in the case of Artin's braid groups, this approach led to interesting results in a number of cases, the central notion being what the authors call a Garside family. The study is far from complete, and the purpose of this book is to present the current state of the theory and to invite further research.

The book has two parts: In Part A, the bases of a general theory, including many easy examples, are developed. In Part B, various more sophisticated examples are specifically addressed.

To make the content accessible to a wide audience of nonspecialists, the book's exposition is essentially self-contained and very few prerequisites are needed. In particular, it should be easy to use this as a textbook both for Garside theory and for the more specialized topics investigated in Part B: Artin–Tits groups, Deligne–Lusztig varieties, groups of algebraic laws, ordered groups, and structure groups of set-theoretic solutions of the Yang–Baxter equation. The first part of the book can be used as the basis for a graduate or advanced undergraduate course.