Lectures on open book decompositions and contact structures
To appear in the proceedings of the ``Floer Homology, Gauge Theory, and Low Dimensional Topology Workshop''.

These are lecture notes from the Clay Mathematics Institute summer school ``Floer Homology, Gauge Theory, and Low Dimensional Topology''. The main goal of these notes is to sketch a proof of Giroux correspondence between open book decompositions of three manifolds and contact structures, and then discuss various applications of this correspondence.

You may download a compressed postscript or a pdf version of this paper.
You may download the version of this paper at the arxiv.