Part I. A New Phase of Matter?: 1. Micro-bang: big bang in the laboratory; 2. Hadrons; 3. Vacuum as a physical medium; 4. Statistical properties of hadronic matter; Part II. Analysis Tools and Experiments: 5. Nuclei in collision; 6. Understanding collision dynamics; 7. Entropy and its relevance in heavy ion collisions; Part III. Particle Production: 8. Particle spectra; 9. Highlights of hadron production; Part IV. Hot Hadronic Matter: 10. Relativistic gas; 11. First look at hadronic gas; 12. Hagedorn gas; Part V. QCD, Hadronic Structure and High Temperature: 13. Hadronic structure and quantum chromodynamics; 14. Perturbative QCD; 15. Lattice quantum chromodynamics; 16. Perturbative quark-gluon plasma; Part VI. Strangeness: 17. Thermal flavor production in deconfined phase; 18. Strangeness background; 19. Hadron freeze-out analysis.