  A review of selected topics in Hirota's bilinear difference equation (HBDE)
is given. This famous 3-dimensional difference equation is known to provide a
canonical integrable discretization for most important types of soliton
equations. Similarly to the continuous theory, HBDE is a member of an infinite
hierarchy. The central point of our exposition is a discrete version of the
zero curvature condition explicitly written in the form of discrete
Zakharov-Shabat equations for M-operators realized as difference or
pseudo-difference operators. A unified approach to various types of M-operators
and zero curvature representations is suggested. Different reductions of HBDE
to 2-dimensional equations are considered. Among them discrete counterparts of
the KdV, sine-Gordon, Toda chain, relativistic Toda chain and other typical
examples are discussed in detail.
