These lectures, given at the Chinese Academy of Sciences for the BeiJing/HangZhou International Summer School in Mathematical Physics, are intended to introduce, to the beginning student in string theory and mathematical physics, aspects of the rich and beautiful subject of D-brane gauge theories constructed from local Calabi-Yau spaces. Topics such as orbifolds, toric singularities, del Pezzo surfaces as well as chaotic duality will be covered
