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This book is devoted to a beautiful and new part of the theory of semigroups created by the author and Lex Renner: the theory of (connected) linear algebraic monoids. It is really surprising that nobody delved into that theory before the end of the 1970ies, although all tools necessary for research had already existed by then; it is no less surprising that we do not see crowds of semigroup theorists plowing up this fertile soil; the first furrow was made by Putcha who was joined by Renner, and they are still alone in the field. In no way does that diminish their achievements, although it says something about the present state of the theory of semigroups. As far as I can remember, it all started when Putcha submitted a paper ``Quadratic semigroups in the plane'' to the journal Linear Algebra and Its Applications in the spring of 1978. In this paper all associative multiplications described by linear or quadratic polynomials on a two- dimensional real plane were classified. Hans Schneider, the Editor-in- Chief of the journal, sent me this paper for refereeing. I remember that my report followed by a letter to Putcha was probably longer than the paper itself. A new version of the paper (under the somewhat different title ``Quadratic semigroups on affine spaces'') appeared in Linear Algebra Appl. 26, 107-121 (1979; Zbl 0409.20049). The only book on linear algebraic groups I had on my bookshelves was a Russian translation of A. Borel's monograph of 1969. Putcha did not need any further prompting, and already his first ``adult'' papers on linear algebraic semigroups (I think of the paper of 1979 as a ``baby'' one, and it is not mentioned in the book) published in June 1980 in Trans. Am. Math. Soc. 259, 457-469 and 471-491 (1980; Zbl 0444.20056 and Zbl 0444.20057)] contained some spectacular results on connected linear algebraic semigroups over an algebraically closed field. It seems that Lex Renner became interested in the same sort of problems independently. His Ph.D. thesis of 1982 and subsequent publications added significant new insights and valuable results to the theory. The book is clearly written and represents a beautiful blend of ideas from abstract semigroup theory, algebraic geometry, and the theory of linear algebraic groups. The problems considered are very natural, and the interplay among these three theories is very spectacular. I am not going to list the contents of the book and describe its main results, but here is a typical result: a connected algebraic monoid with zero is regular if and only if its group of units is reductive. This result shows an elegant connection between regular semigroups, a class of paramount importance in the theory of semigroups, and reductive algebraic groups, a no less important class from the viewpoint of the group theory. The book contains quite a few results like this one. Almost all proofs are included (sometimes they are simpler than in the original publications), and the book is appropriate for reading by graduate students. In fact, the readers' audience which may find reading this book quite interesting and even fascinating is much larger than semigroup theorists. The author must be commended for adding this book to the existing mathematical literature.