Spintronics has received a great attention and considerable interest within the past decades. As a core device in this discipline, magnetic tunnel junction (MTJ) evolved rapidly and already be used in applications such as hard disk drive (HDD) read head and magnetic random access memory (MRAM) etc. In this article, we review some basic effects related to MTJ, for example, giant magnetoresistance (GMR), tunnel magnetoresistance (TMR) and spin transfer torque (STT). Based on these theories, two kinds of MTJs, in‐plane and perpendicular MTJs, are introduced. Then, several magnetization switching methods, which include field‐induced switching, thermally assisted switching, STT switching and recent voltage‐controlled switching, are proposed. In the end, some important applications of MTJs are presented.