  Concomitant with the development of metal-based spintronics in the late
1980's and 1990's, important advances were made on the growth of high-quality
oxide thin films and heterostructures. While this was at first motivated by the
discovery of high-temperature superconductivity in perovskite Cu oxides, this
technological breakthrough was soon applied to other transition metal oxides,
and notably mixed-valence manganites. The discovery of colossal
magnetoresistance in manganite films triggered an intense research activity on
these materials, but the first notable impact of magnetic oxides in the field
of spintronics was the use of such manganites as electrodes in magnetic tunnel
junctions, yielding tunnel magnetoresistance ratios one order of magnitude
larger than what had been obtained with transition metal electrodes. Since
then, the research on oxide spintronics has been intense with the latest
developments focused on diluted magnetic oxides and more recently on
multiferroics. In this paper, we will review the most important results on
oxide spintronics, emphasizing materials physics as well as spin-dependent
transport phenomena, and finally give some perspectives on how the flurry of
new magnetic oxides could be useful for next-generation spintronics devices.
