  In this series of lectures we review observational evidence for, and
theoretical investigations into, cosmic acceleration and dark energy. The notes
are in four sections. First I review the basic cosmological formalism to
describe the expansion history of the universe and how distance measures are
defined. The second section covers the evidence for cosmic acceleration from
cosmic distance measurements. Section 3 discusses the theoretical avenues being
considered to explain the cosmological observations and section 4 discusses how
the growth of inhomogeneities and large scale structure observations might help
us pin down the theoretical origin of cosmic acceleration.
