The Views module is the most popularly contributed module in the Drupal ecosystem, and with good reason, as it has become one of the cornerstones of Drupal development. Along with core features such as the Fields API as well as other modules such as Panels, it has contributed immensely towards Drupal's reputation of being an ideal tool for rapid site development and deployment.
Views, at its most fundamental level is a database query builder. It allows us to construct database queries using a user-friendly interface, and subsequently, present the result to the user in a variety of manners. The query builder supports a number of components including:
Filters which conditionally refine the query to return a more accurate result set. For example, as we will customarily only require nodes that have been published, we can add a filter to the View stating that the result set should only contain published nodes. They can optionally also be exposed to the user as a form element...