In this work we study the two-body hadronic charmed meson decays, including both the PP and VP modes. The latest experimental data are first analyzed in the diagrammatic approach. The magnitudes and strong phases of the flavor amplitudes are extracted from the Cabibbo-favored decay modes using chi(2) minimization. The best-fitted values are then used to predict the branching fractions of the singly Cabibbo-suppressed and doubly Cabibbo-suppressed decay modes in the flavor SU(3) symmetry limit. We observe significant SU(3) breaking effects in some of the singly Cabibbo-suppressed channels. In the case of VP modes, we point out that the A(P) and A(V) amplitudes cannot be completely determined based on currently available data. We conjecture that the quoted experimental results for both D(s)(+) -> (K) over bar (0)K*(+) and D(s)(+) -> rho+eta' are overestimated. We compare the sizes of color-allowed and color-suppressed tree amplitudes extracted from the diagrammatical approach with the effective parameters a(1) and a(2) defined in the factorization approach. The ratio vertical bar a(2)/a(1)vertical bar is more or less universal among the D -> (K) over bar pi, (K) over bar*pi, and (K) over bar rho modes. This feature allows us to discriminate between different solutions of topological amplitudes. For the long-standing puzzle about the ratio Gamma(D(0) -> K(+)K(-))/Gamma(D(0) -> pi(+)pi(-)), we argue that, in addition to the SU( 3) breaking effect in the spectator amplitudes, the long-distance resonant contribution through the nearby resonance f(0)(1710) can naturally explain why D(0) decays more copiously to K(+)K(-) than pi(+)pi(-) through the W-exchange topology. This has to do with the dominance of the scalar glueball content of f(0)(1710) and the chiral-suppression effect in the decay of a scalar glueball into two pseudoscalar mesons. The same final-state interaction also explains the occurrence of D(0) -> K(0)(K) over bar (0) and its vanishing amplitude when SU(3) flavor symmetry is exact. Owing to the G-parity selection rule, D(s)(+) -> pi(+)omega does not receive contributions from the short-distance W-annihilation and resonant final-state interactions, but it can proceed through the weak decays D(s)(+) -> rho(+)eta(()'()) followed by the final-state rescattering of rho+eta(()'()) into pi(+)omega through quark exchange.
