From the reviews: "The appearance of a well-planned, detailed and up-to-date exposition of a topic in abstract algebraic geometry is good news, and the book by J. Lipman and M. Hashimoto definitely has all the above qualities. ... get the book in its current state now than to wait for years until the authors produce a more unified presentation. To conclude, the book by Joseph Lipman and Mitsuyasu Hashimoto is an important contribution to an important task of explaining the main ideas of abstract algebraic geometry ... ." (George Shabat, Bulletin of the London Mathematical Society, March, 2010)