Fortunately, Pearl has distilled the highlights of his book _Causality_ into a 50-page paper that makes a great introduction to the modern theory of causation:

Fortunately, Pearl has distilled the highlights of his book _Causality_ into a 50-page paper that makes a great introduction to the modern theory of causation: http://ftp.cs.ucla.edu/pub/stat_ser/r350.pdf http://ftp.cs.ucla.edu/pub/stat_ser/r350.pdf Through this paper, and others like it, Pearl's ideas are gaining traction.