  These lectures present an overview of the current status of the QCD based
phenomenology for open and hidden heavy flavor production at high energies. A
unified description based on the light-cone color-dipole approach is employed
in all cases. A good agreement with available data is achieved without fitting
to the data to be explained, and nontrivial predictions for future experiments
are made. The key phenomena under discussion are: (i) formation of the wave
function of a heavy quarkonium; (ii) quantum interference and coherence length
effects; (iii) Landau-Pomeranchuk suppression of gluon radiation leading to
gluon shadowing and nuclear suppression of heavy flavors; (iv) higher twist
shadowing related to the finite size of heavy quark dipoles; (v) higher twist
corrections to the leading twist gluon shadowing making it process dependent.
