Graduate textbooks often have a rather daunting heft. So it's pleasant for a text intended for first-year graduate students to be concise, and brief enough that at the end of a course nearly the entire text will have been covered. This book manages that feat, entirely without sacrificing any material coverage. The standard topics of group theory, vector spaces, modules, rings, field and Galois theory are covered, as well as topics in noncommutative rings, group extensions, and selected topics in abelian groups. Some of the brevity is a result of the fact that instead of providing large chunks of exercises of middling difficulty, Wickless (math, University of Connecticut) has opted to provide fewer exercises of greater difficulty.