PrefaceIt is the purpose of this paper to explore the theory of high temperature superconductivity. Much of the motivation for this comes from the study of cuprate high temperature superconductors. However, we do not focus in great detail on the remarkable and exciting physics that has been discovered in these materials. Rather, we focus on the core theoretical issues associated with the mechanism of high temperature superconductivity. Although our discussions of theoretical issues in a strongly correlated superconductor are intended to be self contained and pedagogically complete, our discussions of experiments in the cuprates are, unfortunately, considerably more truncated and impressionistic.Our primary focus is on physics at intermediate temperature scales of order T c (as well as the somewhat larger "pseudogap" temperature) and energies of order the gap maximum, ∆ 0 . Consequently (and reluctantly) we have omitted any detailed discussion of a number of fascinating topics in cuprate superconductivity, including the low energy physics associated with nodal quasiparticles, the properties of the vortex matter which results from the application of a magnetic field, the effects of disorder, and a host of material specific issues. This paper is long enough as it is!