  These are the notes of the three lectures I delivered at the mini-workshop
"Knot Theory and Number Theory around the A-Polynomial" at the Instituto
Superior Tecnico (IST) in Lisbon in January 2014. The goal of the lectures was
to familiarize, both the author and, the audience with the A-polynomials and
the connection between the Mahler measures of A-polynomials and volumes. The
style of these notes is expository, written informally with the aim of giving a
flavor of the subject with ample amount of references to direct the interest
readers to the details.
