Toric varieties are a useful tool for testing theories in algebraic geometry, as they are explicitly constructible through combinatorial means. We'll talk about basic constructions in toric varieties, and at the end we'll discuss Batyrev's construction of mirrors of Calabi-Yau hypersurfaces in Fano toric varieties (such as the quintic threefold). We will also mention further developments by Batyrev-Borisov to generalize the construction for complete intersections.