Statistical learning refers to a vast set of tools and techniques for modelling and understanding complex datasets. A great deal of interest on these aspects has recently surged in the statistical and computer science communities, and statistical learning has become a very hot field in many applications, such as marketing, finance, and other business disciplines. In this short introduction we review basic ideas of supervised and unsupervised learning, classification and regression, statistical models for inference and prediction, interpretability vs flexibility, bias-variance trade-off, overfitting.