This practical guide and reference serves as a unified source book for students and professionals, and it provides a solid basis for further studies in more specialized literature. Based Prince’s decades of practical experience, it can be recommended as an introduction for beginners in crystallography, as a refresher and handy guide for crystallographers working on specific problems, and as a reference for others seeking a dictionary of basic mathematical and crystallographic terms. The third edition further clarifies key points.

In the course of 30 years as a practicing crystallographer I have frequently been faced with the necessity of finding out a little bit about some general branch of mathematics with which I was previously unfamiliar. Under these circumstances I have usually followed the common practice of seeking out some colleague who would be expected to have a thorough knowledge of the subject. I would then find myself faced either with an involved lecture in which the colleague would attempt to distill a lifetime of experience into a form that was comprehensible to a novice with a very different background, or with a book about the subject, written by a specialist, that contained far more information than I really wanted to know. I would have to separate the few kernels of useful material from a large volume of what would probably be wheat to someone else, but was chaff to me. In the course of that time I have acquired a collection of books to which I frequently refer. Most of these have a small number of thoroughly dog-eared pages, along with many that have scarcely been opened. During the same period I have been privileged to associate and collabo rate with a number of materials scientists who were not trained as crystal lographers, but whose interests required them to understand particular details of some structural problem.

In the course of 30 years as a practicing crystallographer I have frequently been faced with the necessity of finding out a little bit about some general branch of mathematics with which I was previously unfamiliar. Under these circumstances I have usually followed the common practice of seeking out some colleague who would be expected to have a thorough knowledge of the subject. I would then find myself faced either with an involved lecture in which the colleague would attempt to distill a lifetime of experience into a form that was comprehensible to a novice with a very different background, or with a book about the subject, written by a specialist, that contained far more information than I really wanted to know. I would have to separate the few kernels of useful material from a large volume of what would probably be wheat to someone else, but was chaff to me. In the course of that time I have acquired a collection of books to which I frequently refer. Most of these have a small number of thoroughly dog-eared pages, along with many that have scarcely been opened. During the same period I have been privileged to associate and collaborate with a number of materials scientists who were not trained as crystallographers, but whose interests required them to understand particular details of some structural problem.

Crystallographers have to apply many mathematical methods in their daily work. If ever they have a problem, this book will help to solve it. The newcomer starting work will learn how to apply these tools, the practicing crystallographer will find all the data and background material he wants to look up. In the decade since the first edition was published, new things have happened that required revision beyond correction of errors. Two chapters have been added: a section on the projection matrix and another on fast Fourier Transform. The author collected the information during his professional career. The success of the first edition indicates that many other practicing crystallographers just need exactly that information.

Anhand verschiedener Beispiele zeigen die Autoren die Bedeutung der Kristallographie für Chemie und Biochemie auf und bieten somit eine gute Zusammenfassung der allgemeinen Prinzipien der Kristallstrukturanalyse. Zum einen sollen Interessierte, die diese Methode nicht selbst durchführen, in die Lage versetzt werden, deren Ergebnisse zu interpretieren. Zum anderen wird dem Leser deutlich gemacht, welche Bedeutung die ungeheure Datenmenge, die sich aus dieser Methode ergibt, einerseits für die Chemie sowie andererseits für die Biochemie hat. Das Buch ist verständlich geschrieben und mit zahlreichen Abbildungen versehen. Durch die Darstellung der Kristallstrukturanalyse im Vergleich zu anderen Methoden ist das Werk auch besonders für fortgeschrittene Studenten geeignet, die sich mit der Kristallographie vertraut machen wollen.