I’m new to Solidity and trying to understand how to work with dictionaries or mappings. In other programming languages, I often use dictionaries to store key-value pairs, but I’m not sure how to do this in Solidity.

Could someone explain how to declare, initialize, and use mappings in Solidity? Specifically, I have the following questions:

How do you define a mapping in a Solidity smart contract?
How can you add, retrieve, and delete key-value pairs in a mapping?
Are there any best practices or common pitfalls I should be aware of when using mappings?
An example illustrating the basic usage would be really helpful. Thanks in advance!