The purpose of this paper is to give basic tools for the classification of nonsingular toric Fano verieties by means of the notions of primitive collections and primitive relations due to Batyrev. By using them we can easily deal with equivariant blow-ups and blow-downs, and get an easy criterion to determine whether a given nonsingular toric variety is a Fano variety or not. As applications of these results, we get a toric version of a theorem of Mori, and can classify, in principle, all nonsingular toric Fano varieties obtained from a given nonsingular toric Fano variety by finite successions of equivariant blow-ups and blow-downs through nonsingular toric Fano varieties. Especially, we get a new method for the classification of nonsingular toric Fano varieties of dimension at most four. These methods are extended to the case of Gorenstein toric Fano varieties endowed with natural resolutions of singularities. Especially, we easily get a new method for the classification of Gorenstein toric Fano surfaces.