Toric varieties form a special and important class of algebraic varieties. In the past few decades, the study of toric geometry has begun to play an increasingly prominent role in algebraic geometry. They provide many examples and serve as a fertile testing ground for theorems and conjectures in algebraic/complex geometry. Moreover, toric geometry is useful in many fields including algebraic statistics, coding theory and mirror symmetry. The geometry of toric varieties can be completely understood by combinatorial objects of convex geometry such as cones, fans, polytopes, etc. Due to this connection between combinatorics and geometry, toric varieties are often much easier to study than arbitrary algebraic varieties. Further, this connection can also be used in the opposite direction to solve certain problems in combinatorics, for example McMullen's conjecture on f-vectors for simplicial polytopes. The aim of this course is to introduce toric varieties and explore how one can use combinatorial techniques to understand their geometric and algebraic properties.