' This book is essential reading for experts in the theory of operator spaces, and for those who want to learn the banach space style advances of the last decade in operator spaces.' Bulletin of the LMSThis book combines an elementary introduction to the theory of 'quantized Banach spaces' with a discussion of some of its most surprising non-classical aspects. Only elementary notions of functional analysis are used, hence the book will be accessible to a wide range of researchers in analysis, mathematical physics, and quantum computation.