The BaBar experiment and the PEP-II accelerator at SLAC started to take data on May 26, 1999. By the time of this conference, the recorded integrated luminosity was 20 fb^{-1}, of which 8 fb^{-1} were analyzed to provide a first set of physics results. This talk reviews the first measurement of sin2beta and the study of B meson decays to charmonium modes and 2-body charmless decays.