As a consequence of its capability of creating high level abstractions from data, deep learning has been effectively employed in a wide range of applications, including physics. Though deep learning can be, at first and simplistically understood in terms of very large neural networks, it also encompasses new concepts and methods. In order to understand and apply deep learning, it is important to become familiarized with the respective basic concepts. In this text, after briefly revising some works relating to physics and deep learning, we introduce and discuss some of the main principles of deep learning as well as some of its principal models. More specifically, we describe the main elements, their use, as well as several of the possible network architectures. A companion tutorial in Python has been prepared in order to complement our approach.