  These lectures provide a basic overview of topics related to the study of CP
Violation in B decays. In the first lecture, I review the basics of discrete
symmetries in field theories, the quantum mechanics of neutral but
flavor-non-trivial mesons, and the classification of three types of CP
violation. The actual second lecture which I gave will be separately published
as it is my Dirac award lecture and is focussed on the separate topic of strong
CP Violation. In Lecture 2 here, I cover the Standard Model predictions for
neutral B decays, and in particular discuss some channels of interest for CP
Violation studies. Lecture 3 reviews the various tools and techniques used to
deal with the hadronic physics effects. In Lecture 4, I briefly review the
present and planned experiments that can study B decays. I cannot teach all the
details of this subject in this short course, so my approach is instead to try
to give students a grasp of the relevant concepts and an overview of the
available tools. The level of these lectures is introductory. I will provide
some references to more detailed treatments and current literature, but this is
not a review article so I do not attempt to give complete references to all
related literature. By now there are some excellent textbooks that cover this
subject in great detail. I refer students to these for more details and for
more complete references to the original literature.
