Intense theoretical and experimental work on the small scale structure of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, and the increasingly more realistic description of the astrophysics of clusters of galaxies and their cosmological evolution, have motivated extensive recent work on the Sunyaev-Zeldovich (SZ) effect. This review begins with a brief summary of the effect and the very significant observational progress in using interferometric arrays to obtain detailed images of the effect in a large number of moderately distant clusters. These measurements yielded important information on cluster masses and the value of the Hubble constant; I review these results and discuss the prospects for improved determination of these quantities from future observations of a large sample of nearby clusters with bolometric array telescopes. The high sensitivity and angular resolution of planned ground, stratospheric, and space telescopes will result in measurements of a large number of distant clusters over most of the sky, and the associated small angular scale CMB anisotropy they induce; I discuss this anisotropy and its expected cosmological yield.
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