These lectures notes are an intoduction for physicists to several ideas and applications of noncommutative geometry. The necessary mathematical tools are presented in a way which we feel should be accessible to physicists. We illustrate applications to Yang-Mills, fermionic and gravity models, notably we describe the spectral action recently introduced by Chamseddine and Connes. We also present an introduction to recent work on noncommutative lattices. The latter have been used to construct topologically nontrivial quantum mechanical and field theory models, in particular alternative models of lattice gauge theory.