A "Markovian" approach is adopted to explore these random discrete surfaces, which is then related to the analogous one-dimensional random walk processes. This technique, known as "peeling exploration" in the literature, can be seen as a generalization of the well-known coding processes for random trees (e.g. breadth first or depth first search). It is revealed that different types of Markovian explorations can yield different types of information about a surface.
Based on an École d'Été de Probabilités de Saint-Flour course delivered by the author in 2019, the book is aimed at PhD students and researchers interested in graph theory, combinatorial probability and geometry. Featuring open problems and a wealth of interesting figures, it is the first book to be published on the theory of random planar maps.