This book provides a pedagogical introduction to the perturbative and non-perturbative aspects of quantum chromodynamics (QCD). Introducing the basic theory and recent advances in QCD, it also reviews the historical development of the subject up to the present day, covering pre-QCD ideas of strong interactions such as the quark and parton models, the notion of colours and the S-matrix approach. The author then discusses gauge theory, techniques of dimensional regularisation and renormalisation, deep inelastic scattering and hard processes in hadron collisions, hadron jets and e+e annihilations. Other topics include power corrections and the technologies of the Shifman-Vainshtein-Zakharov operating product expansion. The final parts of the book are devoted to modern non-perturbative approaches to QCD and the phenomenological aspects of QCD spectral sum rules. The book will be a valuable reference for graduate students and researchers in high-energy particle and nuclear physics, both theoretical and experimental.