This volume introduces a unified, self-contained study of linear discrete parabolic problems through reducing the starting discrete problem to the Cauchy problem for an evolution equation in discrete time. Accessible to beginning graduate students, the book contains a general stability theory of discrete evolution equations in Banach space and gives applications of this theory to the analysis of various classes of modern discretization methods, among others, Runge-Kutta and linear multistep methods as well as operator splitting methods.