  This article is a standalone introduction to sutured Floer homology for
graduate students in geometry and topology. It is divided into three parts. The
first part is an introductory level exposition of Lagrangian Floer homology.
The second part is a construction of Heegaard Floer homology as a special, and
slightly modified, case of Lagrangian Floer homology. The third part covers the
background on sutured manifolds, the definition of sutured Floer homology, as
well as a discussion of its most basic properties and implications (it detects
the product, behaves nicely under surface decompositions, defines an asymmetric
polytope, its Euler characteristic is computable using Fox calculus).
