  The Standard Model of the electroweak and strong interactions of particle
physics is a quantum field theory. Elementary particles are not indivisible
`pieces' of matter but energy bundles of fields, whose properties and
interactions are a consequence of the principles of symmetry. These lecture
notes provide a brief introduction to the construction of the Standard Model
from its basic ingredients: Poincar\'e symmetry, gauge invariance and
spontaneous symmetry breaking. The full Lagrangian is derived in detail and the
most relevant aspects of the electroweak phenomenology are discussed with
special emphasis on the determination of the input parameters and the
consistency checks of the model. Some exercises are proposed to fix the main
ideas.
