This is an introductory course presenting the basics of the AdS/CFT duality. On the way, it will present some interesting physical concepts which are worth being acquainted wth, independently of anti-de Sitter or string theory, such as for example aspects of: confromal filed theories in d>2, the renormalization group, non-abelian gauge theories, the large-N limit, black hole thermodynamics, semiclassical gravity.
