We review the field of high temperature cuprate superconductors, with an emphasis on the nature of their electronic properties. After a general overview of experiment and theory, we concentrate on recent results obtained by angle resolved photoemission, inelastic neutron scattering, and optical conductivity, along with various proposed explanations for these results. We conclude by reviewing efforts which attempt to identify the energy savings involved in the formation of the superconducting ground state.ELECTRONIC NATURE OF HTSC 3 since 1973, and was not much of an improvement over NbN (15K) which had been discovered all the way back in 1941 [1]. This pessimistic outlook was best articulated by Bernd Matthias in a number of papers which still make interesting reading today [2]. Such pessimism was not confined to experiment, as witnessed by the famous paper of Cohen and Anderson [3]. As was well appreciated by that time, the A15 materials with highest T c were on the verge of a structural transition, and thus it was anticipated that one could not push T c much higher before the lattice became unstable [4].Despite this, a number of new classes of superconductors had been discovered in the period before 1986, including the ternary magnetic superconductors such as ErRh 4 B 4 and HoMo 6 S 8 , and various uranium based superconductors such as α-U and U 6 Fe, many of these discovered by Matthias and his various associates. Matthias' speculation that something really different was going on in f electron superconductors was spectacularly confirmed with the discovery by Frank Steglich in 1979 of "heavy fermion" superconductivity in CeCu 2 Si 2 [5], followed by the discovery of superconductivity in UPt 3 and UBe 13 [6].Heavy fermion superconductivity was one of the main research topics in fundamental physics prior to 1986, and its history has had some impact on the cuprate field. Unlike the magnetic superconductors such as ErRh 4 B 4 where the magnetic moments are confined to the rare earth site and the superconductivity to the ligand sites, in heavy fermion superconductors, the f electrons themselves become superconducting. This is known from the extremely high effective mass of the superconducting carriers. More properly, the carriers should be thought of as composite objects of conduction electron charge and f electron spin [7]. The fascinating thing about these materials, though, is that their superconducting ground states do not appear to have the L=0, S=0 symmetry that Cooper pairs exhibit in normal superconductors [8,9].As with cuprates, heavy fermion superconductivity had its own prehistory as well, that being the field of superfluid 3 He. 3 He had been speculated in the 1960s to possibly be a paired superfluid with non-zero orbital angular momentum, in particular L=2 pairing [10]. The idea was that the hard core repulsion of the atoms would prevent L=0 pairing, but that longer range pairs could be stabilized by the attractive van der Waals interaction between the He atoms. Subsequently, Layzer and Fay [11] showed...