Considerable effort is aimed at using the scanning force microscope (SFM) to measure the mechanical properties of surfaces with nanometer-scale resolution. The properties of interest include the Young and shear moduli, shear strength, and work of adhesion. The most widely used approach is to extract these properties from the SFM data by simply scaling the results of the macroscopic continuum mechanics theory of contact to the dimensions-and forces of a SFM contact. This article provides a contemporary overview of contact mechanics from the perspective of SFM. The discussion is limited to nonsliding contacts between linear elastic materials. One of its main goals is to emphasize the assumptions underlying and restricting the application of the most commonly used models and their implications for SFM measurements.