This paper surveys recent remarkable progress in the study of potential theory for symmetric stable processes. It also contains new results on the two-sided estimates for Green functions Poisson kernels and Martin kernels of discontinuous symmetric $alpha$ -stable process in bounded $C^{1,1}$ open sets. The new results give ex-plicit information on how the comparing constants depend on pa-rametrer $alpha$ and consequently recover the green function and Poisson kernel estimates for Brownian motion by passing $alpha{uparrow}2$. In addition to these new estimates this paper surveys recent progress in the study of notions of harmonicity integral representation of harmonic func-tions boundary harnack inequality conditional gauge and intrinsic ultracontractivity for symmetric stable processes. Here is a table of contents.