"This book is an introduction to local analytic geometry, with emphasis on the study of singularities of germs of complex analytic spaces. It is very well written and the authors, assuming very little background on the side of the reader, manage to cover in less than 400 pages a large amount of beautiful material, presented in a didactical way. ( ) This seems to be an excellent introduction to the subject and a very appropriate textbook for a graduate course on these matters" Zentralblatt für Mathematik, 01/09