Book excerpt: This book unifies the different approaches in studying elliptic and parabolic partial differential equations with discontinuous coefficients. To the enlarging market of researchers in applied sciences, mathematics and physics, it gives concrete answers to questions suggested by non-linear models. Providing an up-to date survey on the results concerning elliptic and parabolic operators on a high level, the authors serve the reader in doing further research. Being themselves active researchers in the field, the authors describe both on the level of good examples and precise analysis, the crucial role played by such requirements on the coefficients as the Cordes condition, Campanato's nearness condition, and vanishing mean oscillation condition. They present the newest results on the basic boundary value problems for operators with VMO coefficients and non-linear operators with discontinuous coefficients and state a lot of open problems in the field.