In this paper, the main issues of model-based control methods are first reviewed, followed by the motivations and the state of the art of the model-free adaptive control (MFAC). MFAC is a novel data-driven control method for a class of unknown nonaffine nonlinear discrete-time systems since neither explicit physical model nor Lyapunov stability theory or key technical lemma is used in the controller design and theoretical analysis except only for the input/output (I/O) measurement data. The basis of MFAC is the dynamic linearization data modeling method at each operating point of the closed-loop system. The established dynamic linearization data model is a virtual equivalent data relationship in the I/O sense to the original nonlinear plant by means of a novel concept called pseudo-partial derivative (PPD) or pseudo-gradient (PG) vector. Based on this virtual equivalent dynamic linearization data model and the time-varying PPD or PG estimation algorithm designed merely using the I/O measurements of a controlled plant, the MFAC system is constructed. The main contribution of this paper is that the theoretical analysis of the bounded-input bounded-output stability, the monotonic convergence of the tracking error dynamics, and the internal stability of the full form dynamic linearization based MFAC scheme are rigorously presented by the contraction mapping principle; the well known PID control and the traditional adaptive control for linear time-invariant systems are explicitly shown as the special cases of this MFAC. The simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach.