Many group theorists all over the world have been trying in the last twenty-five years to extend and adapt the magnificent methods of the Theory of Finite Soluble Groups to the more ambitious universe of all finite groups. This is a natural progression after the classification of finite simple groups but the achievements in this area are scattered in various papers.

Our objectives in this book were to gather, order and examine all this material, including the latest advances made, give a new approach to some classic topics, shed light on some fundamental facts that still remain unpublished and present some new subjects of research in the theory of classes of finite, not necessarily solvable, groups.