  Our understanding of extra-solar planet systems is highly driven by advances
in observations in the past decade. Thanks to high precision spectrograph, we
are able to reveal unseen companions to stars with the radial velocity method.
High precision photometry from the space, especially with the Kepler mission,
enables us to detect planets when they transit their stars and dim the stellar
light by merely one percent or smaller. Ultra wide-field, high cadence,
continuous monitoring of the Galactic bulge from different sites around the
southern hemisphere provides us the opportunity to observe microlensing effects
caused by planetary systems from the solar neighborhood, all the way to the
Milky Way center. The exquisite AO imaging from ground-based large telescopes,
coupled with high-contrast coronagraph, captured the photons directly emitted
by planets around other stars. In this article, I present a concise review of
the extra-solar planet discoveries, discussing the strengths and weaknesses of
the major planetary detection methods, providing an overview of our current
understanding of planetary formation and evolution given the tremendous
observations delivered by various methods, as well as on-going and planned
observation endeavors to provide a clear picture of extra-solar planetary
systems.
