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This book is devoted to the Green's function methods of quantum field theory being a powerful mathematical tool for studying the complex interacting systems of solid state physics. The book grew out of a course of intercollegiate graduate lectures given one of the authors in the University of London. The book is divided into twelve chapters. In the first three chapters it is used the harmonic lattice as an exactly soluble example to study and compare the principal methods for calculating Green's functions. The physical phenomena produced by the interaction between atoms in this case are the propagating modes - excitation energy is handed on from one atom to the next so as to produce traveling sound waves (quantized as phonons). The formalism developed in Chapter 1 deals with ground state properties of many-body systems and applies to systems in which temperature effects are negligible. In Chapter 2, the techniques developed in Chapter 1 are extended to deal with non-zero temperatures. The use of the temperature Green's function, in which the time variable is replaced by a temperature variable, allows to determine the time-dependent Green's function need for the neutron scattering cross-section. As result, it is calculated the phonon Green's function by setting up and solving its equation of motion in closed form, i.e. the perturbation series could be summed exactly. In Chapter 3, a powerful alternative method of developing the perturbation theory for the Green's function is considered, based on the methods of relativistic quantum field theory, the so-called, Feynman-Dyson expansion. In contrast to the use of motion equations the idea is to expand the operators in the original form of the Green's function before one attempts to evaluate expectation values of operators. Thereby one obtains terms of arbitrary order in the perturbation series. The relation between the Green's function formalism and scattering theory is studied in Chapters 4 and 5. Firstly, the effect of a single impurity atom on an electron gas, it is considered which is taken to be non-interacting, but is perturbed by the potential due to the impurity atom. The end product of Chapter 4 is the calculation of the effect of the impurity potential on the measurable physical properties of metals. In Chapter 5, time-dependent properties of the electron gas are studied being the many-impurity system. It is explained how the irreversibility effect of the response of the system is built into the mathematics for the particular case of the electron-impurity system. Chapter 6 considers systems of interacting particles through some sort of potential with dominating quantum effects. The Green's function formalism is used to study the effect of Coulomb interactions on the properties of an electron gas. This corresponds to a case where, in the high density limit, the so-called random phase approximations works excellently. The issues of the magnetic instabilities of the interacting electron gas resulting from the repulsive Coulomb interactions are considered in Chapter 7. Here, the authors concentrate on the simplest form of the magnetic instability, namely ferromagnetism. The simplest aspects of instability due to the Coulomb interaction localized at a point impurity inserted in the metal are studied, too. Chapter 8 is devoted to the case, when physics is dominated by the Coulomb interactions and the electrons are to a high degree localized on particular atoms. For this, there are considered the atomic wave functions into which the Coulomb interactions are introduced by the usual Hund's rules, and the effects of atomic overlap as a weak perturbation, are discussed. After discussing this transition from band limit to atomic limit, the atuhors study the spin wave excitations in the resulting insulating magnetic system (the Heisenberg model). The sudden change of potential due to one-electron excitation, leading to a transient perturbation of the electron gas is studied in Chapter 9. The occuring singularity shows up in the energy dependence of the cross-section for ejecting photoelectrons from the core state, in the total absorption cross-section for the soft x-ray photons at the threshold of the core electron -- Fermi level transition, and in the soft x-ray emission spectrum of metals. Moreover, the low-temperature anomaly of the electrical resistivity (the Kondo model) in certain dilute alloys, being the effect related to the singular transient response of the fermi gas, is also studied. The dominance of the Pauli principle for low-lying fermion excitations can lead to other singular effects. The most dramatic of these, namely the occurence of superconductivity in the presence of weak attractive forces is discussed in Chapter 10. The approach developed demonstrates the analogy between the superconducting ground state and ferromagnetic one of Chapter 7. Chapter 11 focuses on the understanding of the Kondo problem and its perturbative exact solutions. Rather than going into the details of these solutions the authors instead adopt a nonperturbative approach based on the slave boson picture. This method allows the development of a mean field solution to the Kondo problem which is analogous to the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer mean field treatment of superconductivity. In the final chapter there are some basic theoretical ideas of the physics of the high-temperature cuprate compounds. In total, this book is an excellent sample of introduction into condensed matter physics which successfully combines deep physical approaches with strict mathematics. It should be recommended to graduate students studying solid state physics as well as experimentalists who would like a quick view on the subject.