Black hole entropy and attractors

The introductory lectures delivered at the 2006 RTN Winter School on Strings, Supergravity and Gauge Theories at CERN and the 2005 Shanghai Summer School on Recent Trends in M/String Theory were aimed at Ph.D students and recent postdocs. We describe recent progress in understanding quantum aspects of black holes after reviewing the relevant background material, and illustrate the basic concepts with a few examples.