  Black-hole perturbation theory is a useful tool to investigate issues in
astrophysics, high-energy physics, and fundamental problems in gravity. It is
often complementary to fully-fledged nonlinear evolutions and instrumental to
interpret some results of numerical simulations. Several modern applications
require advanced tools to investigate the linear dynamics of generic small
perturbations around stationary black holes. Here, we present an overview of
these applications and introduce extensions of the standard semianalytical
methods to construct and solve the linearized field equations in curved
spacetime. Current state-of-the-art techniques are pedagogically explained and
exciting open problems are presented.
