Charmless Hadronic B Meson Decays

We give an overview of the experimental measurements and the theoretical understanding of the branching fractions and CP-violating asymmetries of charmless B meson decays. Most experimental results are from the BaBar and Belle Collaborations' data, accumulated during the past decade. The global features of these experimental results are typically well described by quantum chromodynamics (QCD)-motivated theories such as QCD factorization, perturbative QCD, and soft-collinear effective theory. The agreement between theory and experiment is generally satisfactory, although there remain sot-tie unsolved puzzles that pose a great challenge to both theorists and experimentalists.