Synchrotron radiation is a most powerful source for electromagnetic radiation with wide applications in a variety of research areas. With synchrotron radiation one can span in a continuous manner a large photon energy range. The radiation is intense and stronly polarized, linearly or circularly. The third generation synchrotron radiation sources which are now coming into operation are optimized for the utilization of insertion devices, i.e. undulators and wigglers, in the straight sections of the storage rings. The utilization of resonant spectroscopies will be discussed. The element specificity at core level thresholds can be used to focus on specific elements or even chemically different species of the same element in complex environments, e.g. at buried interfaces or in adsorbed molecules. The utilization of such techniques will be discussed in different regimes of the electronic structure. The characterization of the electronic states in CuNi systems will be discussed. Resonant photoemission, autoionization or resonant x-ray scattering also allow one to study dynamic properties of the excited states, e.g. probing charge transfer processes between weakly adsorbed molecules and surfaces. It is also shown how X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy at a resolution of 50 meV of adsorbed molecules make it possible to resolve vibrational fine-structure, thereby enhancing the information contents in the spectra considerably. The new way of studying chemical bonding at surfaces using x-ray emission spectroscopy will also discussed