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Pyro
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Advantages
Fast and well armoured, with several interesting tricks up his (asbestos) sleeve.
Disadvantages
Ineffective underwater and at long range.
Health
100
Armour
150 (spawns with 50)
Typical role
Offence or forward defence.
Notable Weapons
Flamethrower
A devastating close range weapon, that does persistant damage. Like all the pyro's flame-based weapons, enemies that are hit will be set on fire and will burn for several seconds, doing further damage and obstructing their vision.
Incendiary Cannon
A rocket launcher. The rockets from this weapon do much less direct damage than the soldier's rocket launcher, but they have a larger area of splash damage, and a couple of extra tricks - any targets in the blast radius will be set on fire (causing the same damage as the flamethrower). Secondly, this secondary damage can pass through walls - making this weapon useful for attacks on difficult-to-reach enemies or sentries.
Napalm Grenade
Explodes and scatters napalm, creating a sheet of flame. Like the Soldier's Nail grenade, this weapon can greatly discourage enemies from entering a given area. It is also pretty effective against sentry guns, not least because it will also do damage to an engineer attempting to repair the gun.
Offensive capacity
Good. The flamethrower, though lacking range, is devastating up close. However, a pyro's most effective weapon is his speed. Few players realise just how fast a pyro is - a pyro can outrun a soldier with ease, and has an unmatched combination of speed and fairly heavy armour. This makes the pyro well-suited to extracting a flag from a heavily defended area - he can survive much more damage than a scout or medic, and has enough firepower to badly hurt any defenders who get in the way. The pyro has enough grenades to threaten sentries, and is even fast enough to be capable of circle-strafing sentries with the flamethrower.
Defensive capacity
The pyro is not suited to blocking bottlenecks he doesn't have enough armour to withstand a concerted attack by heavier classes, and his speed is only an advantage when there's room to move. On the other hand, the persistant damage of his fire-based weapons means he can work well in forward defence, simply igniting enemies as they pass, rather than trying to stop them, in order to weaken them for the inner defence.
How to fight them
Keep your distance - the Flamethrower is limited to about 10 yards range. The pyro is a real threat to lighter classes, but heavier classes can usually beat them in straight fight if the pyro isn't smart enough to run away. Pyros themselves are fairly fireproof, so the worst possible class to fight them is another pyro.
Tricks
Shooting round corners
The Flamethrower has some peculiar properties. It launches a steady stream of fireballs, each of which travels in a straight line, steadily expanding in size. When standing still, the effect is a cone of damage. The fun comes from the fact that a fireball will only be stopped by a wall if its centre is blocked - the edges of the fireball can pass through walls. This allows a pyro to do damage to (for instance) sentry guns while remaining out of sight. Of course, this doesn't work very well against other players, since they tend to notice that they're on fire, and try to do unpleasant things to the man with the flamethrower.
SmokeScreen (well, FlameScreen, actually)
The other notable trick with the Flamethrower is to make use of its vision- blocking capacity. A pyro can lay down a solid sheet of flame which will significanty obstruct vision. This is most useful when running through an area being swept by snipers - by keeping up a steady stream of fire, a pyro can make it very difficult for a sniper to get a good clear shot.
Rocket Jumping
Yes, Pyros can rocket jump. They can't jump anywhere near as high as a soldier, but they take very little damage in the process. A pyro can easily make 3 rocket jumps in quick succession, and still have useful levels of health and armour left afterwards.