The Status of the P Versus NP Problem

I just read a very insightful article on the status of the P versus NP problem, which was published in the Communications of the ACM:

http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2009/9/38904-the-status-of-the-p-versus-np-problem/fulltext

The author not only explains the problem in detail and the implications of solving it in modern computer science, but also presents some of the research attempts to solve it during the past decades and a compact survey of what is happening right now in this field.