Nikolai Saveliev 
Lectures on the Topology of 3-Manifolds [PDF ebook] 
An Introduction to the Casson Invariant

Frontmatter — Preface — Contents — Introduction — Glossary — Lecture 1. Heegaard splittings — Lecture 2. Dehn surgery — Lecture 3. Kirby calculus — Lecture 4. Even surgeries — Lecture 5. Review of 4-manifolds — Lecture 6. Four-manifolds with boundary — Lecture 7. Invariants of knots and links — Lecture 8. Fibered knots — Lecture 9. The Arf-invariant — Lecture 10. Rohlin’s theorem — Lecture 11. The Rohlin invariant — Lecture 12. The Casson invariant — Lecture 13. The group SU(2) — Lecture 14. Representation spaces — Lecture 15. The local properties of representation spaces — Lecture 16. Casson’s invariant for Heegaard splittings — Lecture 17. Casson’s invariant for knots — Lecture 18. An application of the Casson invariant — Lecture 19. The Casson invariant of Seifert manifolds — Conclusion — Exercises — Bibliography — Index