The aim of this review paper is to discuss some of the advanced sampling techniques proposed in the last decade in the framework of planar near-field measurements, clarifying the theoretical basis of the different techniques, and showing the advantages in terms of number of measurements. Instead of discussing the details of the techniques, the attention is focused on their theoretical bases to give a gentle introduction to the techniques. For each sampling method, examples on a liner array are discussed to clarify the advantages and disadvantages of the method.