These lectures are centred around tree-level scattering amplitudes in pure Yang-Mills theories, the most prominent example is given by the tree-level gluon amplitudes of QCD. I will discuss several ways of computing these amplitudes, illustrating in this way recent developments in perturbative quantum field theory. Topics covered in these lectures include colour decomposition, spinor and twistor methods, off- and on-shell recursion, MHV amplitudes and MHV expansion, the Grassmannian and the amplituhedron, the scattering equations and the CHY representation. At the end of these lectures there will be an outlook on the relation between pure Yang-Mills amplitudes and scattering amplitudes in perturbative quantum gravity.

162 pages, based on lectures given at the Saalburg Summer School, September 2016, v2: version to be published