2024 TASI Lectures: A Dark Matter Primer

These notes are based on a sequence of 4 lectures delivered at the 2024 Theoretical Advanced Study Institute (TASI) and at the Universit\`a degli Studi di Padova. They are intended for graduate students at the early stages of their study of dark matter with some prior exposure to cosmology and quantum field theory. The primary aim is to offer an accessible introduction to dark matter and to lay the groundwork for exploring its phenomenology. These lectures are not intended to serve as a comprehensive review. We begin by motivating the study of dark matter through a discussion of the empirical evidence and the constraints it places on dark matter properties. This is followed by an overview of several canonical mechanisms for the production of cosmological dark matter, and a concluding section that surveys current experimental and observational efforts to detect it with a focus on direct detection.