First, I will give a brief overview on the symmetric generating functions and permutation statistics, including the classical results by Carlitz, Roselle and Scoville (1966), by Garsia and Gessel (1978), by Gessel and Reutenauer (1993), etc. Second, I will focus on my recent work on the refined enumerations of permutations according to the Eulerian and Stirling statistics, highlighting their connections to transformations of basic hypergeometric series. This talk requires no prior knowledge.