The concept of traces has been introduced for describing non-sequential behaviour of concurrent systems via its sequential observations. Traces represent concurrent processes in the same way as strings represent sequential ones. The theory of traces can be used as a tool for reasoning about nets and it is hoped that applying this theory one can get a calculus of the concurrent processes anologous to that available for sequential systems. The following topics will be discussed: algebraic properties of traces, trace models of some concurrency phenomena, fixed-point calculus for finding the behaviour of nets, modularity, and some applications of the presented theory.