  Current particle phenomenology is characterized by the spectacular agreement
of the predictions of the Standard Model of particle physics (SM) with all
results from collider experiments and by the absence of significant signals of
non-standard physics, despite the fact that we know that the SM cannot be the
ultimate theory of nature. In this situation, confronting theory and experiment
with high precision is a promising direction to look for potential traces of
physics beyond the SM. On the theory side, the calculation of radiative
corrections of the strong and electroweak interactions is at the heart of this
task, a field that has seen tremendous conceptual and technical progress in the
last decades. This review aims at a coherent introduction to the field of
electroweak corrections and tries to fill gaps in the literature between
standard textbook knowledge and the current state of the art. The SM and the
machinery for its perturbative evaluation are reviewed in detail, putting
particular emphasis on renormalization, on one-loop techniques, on modern
amplitude methods and tools, on the separation of infrared singularities in
real-emission corrections, on electroweak issues connected with hadronic
initial or final states in collisions, and on the issue of unstable particles
in quantum field theory together with corresponding practical solutions.
