These are the notes from a one-week course on Braid Monodromy of Algebraic Curves given at the Université de Pau et des Pays de l’Adour during the Première Ecole Franco-Espagnole: Groupes de tresses et topologie en petite dimension in October 2009.This is intended to be an introductory survey through which we hope we can briefly outline the power of the concept monodromy as a common area for group theory, algebraic geometry, and topology of projective curves.The main classical results are stated...

In this work, we describe the historic links between the study of $3$-dimensional manifolds (specially knot theory) and the study of the topology of complex plane curves with a particular attention to the role of braid groups and Alexander-like invariants (torsions, different instances of Alexander polynomials). We finish with detailed computations in an example.