I will describe Riemann-problem-solver-free non-oscillatory central-upwind schemes for hyperbolic systems of conservation laws and show how these schemes can be extended to hyperbolic systems of balance laws. I will focus on the Saint-Venant system and related shallow water models. The main difficulty in this extension is preserving a delicate balance between the flux and source terms. This is especially important in many practical situations, in which the solutions to be captured are (relatively) small perturbations of steady-state solutions. The other crucial point is preserving positivity of the computed water depth (and/or other quantities, which are supposed to remain nonnegative). I will present a general approach of designing well-balanced positivity preserving central-upwind schemes and illustrate their performance on a number of shallow water models.