This document provides an introduction and overview of support vector machines (SVMs) for text classification. It discusses how SVMs find an optimal separating hyperplane between classes that maximizes the margin between the classes. It explains how SVMs can handle non-linear classification through the use of kernels to map data into higher-dimensional feature spaces. The document also discusses evaluation metrics like precision, recall, and accuracy for text classification and the differences between micro-averaging and macro-averaging of these metrics.