Combinatorial optimization is one of the youngest and most active areas of discrete mathematics, and is probably its driving force today. This book describes the most important ideas, theoretical results, and algorithms of this field. It is conceived as an advanced graduate text, and it can also be used as an up-to-date reference work for current research. The book includes the essential fundamentals of graph theory, linear and integer programming, and complexity theory. It covers classical topics in combinatorial optimization as well as very recent ones. The emphasis is on theoretical results and algorithms with provably good performance. Some applications and heuristics are mentioned, too.