This primer is a collection of notes based on lectures that were originally given at IIT Madras (India) and at IFT Madrid (Spain). It is a concise and pragmatic course on applied holography focusing on the basic analytic and numerical techniques involved.
The presented lectures are not intended to provide all the fundamental theoretical background, which can be found in the available literature, but they concentrate on concrete applications of AdS/CFT to hydrodynamics, quantum chromodynamics and condensed matter.
The idea is to accompany the reader step by step through the various benchmark examples with a classmate attitude, providing details for the computations and open-source numerical codes in Mathematica, and sharing simple tricks and warnings collected during the author¿s research experience.
At the end of this path, the reader will be in possess of all the fundamental skills and tools to learn by him/herself more advanced techniques and to produce independent and novel research in the field.

A Strings-less introduction to AdS-CFT.-  A Practical Understanding of the Dictionary.- The first big success: ¿/s and Hydrodynamics.- Holographic Transport via analytic and numerical techniques.

Matteo Baggioli is a Severo-Ochoa Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Theoretical Physics, IFT-UAM Madrid. He has obtained his Bachelor of Science and his Master in Theoretical Physics at the University of Genova (Italy) with a Master Thesis on M-branes Geometries in M-Theory.

He obtained his PhD in Theoretical Physics from the Autonomous University of Barcelona UAB under the supervision of prof. Oriol Pujolas. During his PhD he has been a visiting fellow in University of Illinois UI in the group of prof. Philip Phillips.

After, he moved for his first postdoc at the Crete Center for Theoretical Physics (Greece) under the supervision of prof. Elias Kiritsis.

Matteo has been awarded an extraordinary prize by Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona UAB for his PhD thesis.

He is well known for his work on applied holography and condensed matter and more specifically for the description of holographic models and transport with broken translational invariance. He has authored more than 30 publications on the subject and several well-known works.