  Massive stars evolve toward the catastrophic collapse of their innermost
core, producing core-collapse supernova (SN) explosions as the end products.
White dwarfs, formed through evolution of the less massive stars, also explode
as thermonuclear SNe if certain conditions are met during the binary evolution.
Inflating opportunities in transient observations now provide an abundance of
data, with which we start addressing various unresolved problems in stellar
evolution and SN explosion mechanisms. In this chapter, we overview the stellar
evolution channels toward SNe, explosion mechanisms of different types, and
explosive nucleosynthesis. We then summarize observational properties of SNe
through which the natures of the progenitors and explosion mechanisms can be
constrained.
