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I am doing a reading course this semester on Geometric Group Theory. I have been following A Course on Geometric Group Theory by Bowditch. The professor who is guiding me is not aware of good textbooks on Geometric Group Theory. I am looking for a supplement to Bowditch's book.

Initially I began reading the book Groups, Graphs and Trees: An Introduction to the Geometry of Infinite Groups by John Meier. Although this is a nicely written book, I found its approach (and the professor I am reading under agreed) too combinatorial. Could someone suggest sources, especially ones that develop the theory of hyperbolic groups and the related machinery in a self contained manner?

I should mention that I do not have command over French or Russian, so sources should be in English.

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    Maybe : http://www.mathematik.uni-regensburg.de/loeh/teaching/ggt_ws1011/lecture_notes.pdf2012-07-04

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This lecture notes are quite useful: http://www.math.ethz.ch/~alsisto/LectureNotesGGT.pdf

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A great newer text is Office Hours With a Geometric Group Theorist.

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Check out these notes: http://www.math.utah.edu/~sg/Papers/banff.pdf

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    I found Jim Howie's notes on Hyperbolic groups useful (although they do not go into *too* much detail, for example they only give a sketch proof of the solution to the conjugacy problem). They can be found [here](http://www.ma.hw.ac.uk/~jim/samos.pdf).2012-07-05
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When I began studying geometric group theory, the class texts were Bridson and Haflinger's "Metric Spaces of Nonpositive Curvature," Pierre de la Harpe's "Sur les groupes hyperboliques d'après Mikhael Gromov" (in French). I found that Ratcliffe's "Foundations of Hyperbolic Manifolds" and Larry C. Grove's "Classical Groups and Geometric Algebra" help as far as getting used to seeing more elementary examples and results about groups and geometry. Also, Thurston's "Geometry and Topology of Three-Manifolds," although Ratcliffe covers most of the same material in what, I feel, can be a more accessible text.