A well done RNA-Seq experiment can provide the most comprehensive, accurate and unbiased way to study gene expression, alternative splicing, RNA variation and RNA structure. The past few years have seen amazing technological advances that have led to a wide range of improvements in the RNA-Seq experimental process. Next-Generation RNA-Seq studies are unbiased and accurate, yet sensitive enough to work well with low amounts of total RNA (even if the RNA is highly degraded or comes from FFPE samples). These new methods are also less expensive, require less hands-on-time, and are easier to perform than ever before. Finally the data analysis bottleneck associated with RNA-Seq studies has been completely removed with the advent of pipelines that take full advantage of massively parallel cloud computing resources. In this talk I will review the state-of-the-art in RNA-Seq experimental design, library prep, sequencing and data analysis.