In the past 15 years, the theory of crossed products has enjoyed a period of vigorous development. The foundations have been strengthened and reorganized from new points of view, especially from the viewpoint of graded rings. The purpose of this monograph is to give, in a self-contained manner, an up-to-date account of various aspects of this development, in an effort to convey a comprehensive picture of the current state of the subject. It is assumed that the reader has had the equivalent of a standard first-year graduate course, thus familiarity with basic ring-theoretic and group-theoretic concepts and an understanding of elementary properties of modules, tensor products and fields. A chapter on algebraic preliminaries is included, which briefly surveys topics required later in the book.