Water-hammer waves propagation is an important phenomenon arising in numerous applications. It is also a long-standing topic in the fields of mechanics, mechanical engineering and civil engineering. This review first presents the basic mechanism associated with water-hammer waves as well as a brief historical survey of the topic. It then develops along the twentieth century progress both regarding the Fluid-Structure-Interaction (FSI) influence and wave dissipation modeling. The second part of the review presents recent developments shading new lights on some aspects of the wave propagation with a fluid mechanical viewpoint. This review covers various aspects related to the influence of visco-elastic properties of the pipe's wall, asymptotic analysis as well as wave propagation within networks. Albeit discursive in many places, this review also tries to establish and derive many of the presented results from first principles, as well as emphasize the theoretical understanding of the topic.