Designed to make learning introductory algebraic geometry as easy as possible, this text is intended for advanced undergraduates and graduate students who have taken a one-year course in algebra and are familiar with complex analysis. This newly updated second edition enhances the original treatment's extensive use of concrete examples and exercises with numerous figures that have been specially redrawn in Adobe Illustrator.

An introductory chapter that focuses on examples of curves is followed by a more rigorous and careful look at plane curves. Subsequent chapters explore commutative ring theory and algebraic geometry as well as varieties of arbitrary dimension and some elementary mathematics on curves. Upon finishing the text, students will have a foundation for advancing in several different directions, including toward a further study of complex algebraic or analytic varieties or to the scheme-theoretic treatments of algebraic geometry.