  We review various effective potential methods which have been useful to
compute the Higgs mass spectrum and couplings of the minimal supersymmetric
standard model. We compare results where all-loop next-to-leading-log
corrections are resummed by the renormalization group, with those where just
the leading-log corrections are kept. Pole masses are obtained from running
masses by addition of convenient self-energy diagrams. Approximate analytical
expressions are worked out, providing an excellent approximation to the
numerical results which include all next-to-leading-log terms. An appropriate
treatment of squark decoupling allows to consider large values of the stop
and/or sbottom mixing parameters and thus fix a reliable upper bound on the
mass of the lightest CP-even Higgs boson mass.
