In this thesis, we offer a general rime Ideal rinciple for proving that certain ideal in a commutative ring are prime. This leads to a direct and uniform treatment of a number of standard result on prime ideals in commutative algebra, due to Krull, Cohen, Kaplansky, Herstein, Isaacs, Mcdam, D.D.Anderson, and others. More significantly, the simple nature of the Prime Ideal Principle enable us to generate a large number of hitherto unknown result of the "maximal implies prime" variety.The key otion used in our uniform approach to such prime ideal problem are those of Oka familise and Ako familise of ideals in a commutative ring, define in thi paper.