The Tile Calorimeter (TileCal) of the ATLAS experiment at the LHC is the central hadronic calorimeter designed for energy reconstruction of hadrons, jets, tau-particles and missing transverse energy. TileCal is a scintillator-steel sampling calorimeter and it covers the region of pseudorapidity < 1.7. The scintillation light produced in the scintillator tiles is transmitted to photomultiplier tubes (PMTs). Signals from the PMTs are amplified, shaped and digitized by sampling the signal every 25 ns. Each stage of the signal production from scintillation light to the signal reconstruction is monitored and calibrated. Results on the calorimeter operation and performance are presented, including the calibration, stability, absolute energy scale...