Superconducting qubits are Josephson junction-based circuits that exhibit macroscopic quantum behavior and can be manipulated as artificial atoms. Benefiting from the well-developed technology of microfabrication and microwave engineering, superconducting qubits have great advantages in design flexibility, controllability, and scalability. Over the past decade, there has been rapid progress in the field, which greatly improved our understanding of qubit decoherence and circuit optimization. The single-qubit coherence time has been steadily raised to the order of 10 to 100 μs, allowing for the demonstration of high-fidelity gate operations and measurement-based feedback control. Here we review recent progress in the coherence and readout of superconducting qubits.