Increasing demand for precision miniaturised components made of hard and brittle materials can no longer meet the requirements by conventional machining and advanced machining processes. To facilitate high precision machining, vibration is introduced in any of workpiece, tool and working medium, which is called Vibration Assisted Machining (VAM). In this review, the advancements of VAM in conventional machining as well as in advanced machining are presented. In detail, general overview, classifications, basic kinematics of 1-D and 2-D VAM, chip formation and instrumental implementation issues of VAM, are discussed. In addition to this the reasons for improvements in machining process and promising areas to be explored in VAM are summarized. © 2014 The Authors.