Thin films have many practical applications in fields as diverse as optics, electronics, sensors and mechanics. It has therefore become absolutely essential to know and understand the mechanisms of thin-film growth for the realization of these devices. This is the aim of this work, which is presented in a manuscript structured into four chapters.The first chapter is devoted to introducing some notions of surface structure, followed by a description of a few types of surface.In the second chapter, we give a fairly general presentation of substrate treatments.In the third chapter, we present the various stages of sample preparation prior to thin-film deposition. In this section, we also present the various thin-film deposition techniques, along with their applications, advantages and disadvantages. Characterization techniques (structural, chemical composition, optical properties, electrical and mechanical properties) are the subject of the fourth chapter.