Deep Inelastic Scattering of Leptons and Hadrons in the QCD Parton Model and Experimental Tests

We present the basic aspects of deep inelastic phenomena in the framework of the QCD parton model. After recalling briefly the standard kinematics, we discuss the physical interpretation of unpolarized and polarized structure functions in terms of parton distributions together with several important sum rules. We also make a rapid survey of the experimental situation together with phenomenological tests, in particular concerning various QCD predictions. In the summary, we try to identify some significant open questions, to clarify where we stand and to see what we expect to learn in the future.