This paper presents synthetically the most recent models for description of the anisotropic plastic behavior. The first section gives an overview of the classical models. Further, the discussion is focused on the anisotropic formulations developed on the basis of the theories of linear transformations and tensor representations, respectively. Those models are applied to different types of materials: body centered, faced centered and hexagonalclose packed metals. A brief review of the experimental methods used for characterizing and modeling the anisotropic plastic behavior of metallic sheets and tubes under biaxial loading is presented together with the models and methods developed for predicting and establishing the limit strains. The capabilities of some commercial programs specially designed for the computation of forming limit curves (FLC) are also analyzed.