In this review we have aimed to capture the state of the FRB field as it stands at the beginning of 2019, with exciting prospects just around the corner. We have highlighted the major results from the past decade and summarized our current knowledge of FRBs and their properties. With a rapidly growing population of known sources, and more precision localizations on the near horizon, we expect to learn a lot more in the coming years. Maximizing the information that can be gleaned from each FRB – e.g. polarimetric properties, rotation measure, temporal structure – will also continue to provide valuable clues. Another critical piece of work in the coming years will be to fully understand our telescope and analysis systematics, in order to quantify incompleteness and biases in FRB searches.
New FRB-finding machines are coming on-line with the first light of ASKAP, CHIME, APERTIF, and MeerKAT in 2018 and a enormous number of FRB discoveries expected in the coming years. These and other instruments already operating around the world – such as UTMOST, Parkes, GBT, Arecibo, LOFAR, and the VLA – are expected to find possibly hundreds of FRBs per year going forward. As the population of FRBs continues to grow we may expect to learn more about whether sub-populations of FRBs exist in different areas of the parameter space. Undoubtedly, as new interesting FRB observations are published, more theories about FRB progenitors and emission will emerge to explain what we see. New observations that may be particularly fruitful for theorists may be the discovery of several more repeaters in the next 100+ FRB discoveries, the detection of periodicity from any repeaters in the population, the presence of similar spectral structure in a large number of FRBs, and the discovery of FRB pulses at much higher or lower radio frequencies.