This volume presents recent advances in continuous optimization; it is authored by four well-known experts in the field and presents classical as well as advanced material on currently active research areas, such as: the family of Sequential Quadratic Programming methods for local constrained optimization, the study of Global Optimization by means of (non-convex) standard quadratic problems, Nonsmooth Optimization, and recent advances in Interior Point Methods for nonlinear optimization. The book is intended as a reference work for advanced research in the field of optimization theory and methods.