  One of the major challenges of particle physics has been to gain an in-depth
understanding of the role of quark flavor and measurements and theoretical
interpretations of their results have advanced tremendously: apart from masses
and quantum numbers of flavor particles, there now exist detailed measurements
of the characteristics of their interactions allowing stringent tests of
Standard Model predictions. Among the most interesting phenomena of flavor
physics is the violation of the CP symmetry that has been subtle and difficult
to explore. Till early 1990s observations of CP violation were confined to
neutral $K$ mesons, but since then a large number of CP-violating processes
have been studied in detail in neutral $B$ mesons. In parallel, measurements of
the couplings of the heavy quarks and the dynamics for their decays in large
samples of $K, D$, and $B$ mesons have been greatly improved in accuracy and
the results are being used as probes in the search for deviations from the
Standard Model. In the near future, there will be a transition from the current
to a new generation of experiments, thus a review of the status of quark flavor
physics is timely. This report summarizes the results of the current generation
of experiments that is about to be completed and it confronts these results
with the theoretical understanding of the field.
