The monographs which the course is primarily based on are:

• A revised version of Sanjeev Arora's 1994 Berkeley Ph.D. thesis, Probabilistically Checkable Proofs and Hardness of Approximation Problems is available as a technical report from Princeton University.
• Madhu Sudan's 1992 Berkeley Ph.D. thesis Efficient Checking of Polynomials and Proofs, and the Hardness of Approximation Problems has been published as Springer-Verlag, Lecture Notes in Computer Science volume 1001. Unfortunately it is not available electronically.
• Laszlo Babai has a nice survey Transparent Proofs and Limits to Approximation.
• The article "Probabilistically Checkable Proofs and their Consequences for Approximation Algorithms" by S. Hougardy, H.J. Proemel and A. Steger has a complete proof of the PCP theorem. It appeared in Trends in Discrete Mathematics, Topics in Discrete Mathematics 8, North-Holland, 1995, pp. 175-223.
• Mihir Bellare has a page with many more pointers to articles on probabilistically checkable proofs and the hardness of approximation problems.

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