Customer Reviews

Crystal Structure Determination (Oxford Chemistry Primers)

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This book is one of the best introduction in crystal structure analysis that I have ever seen! Due to it's limited size (and price !!) it covers the most important topics of x-ray structure analysis in an easy understandable language without boring the reader with mathematical details. You really get a good impression about what the basic principles and problems of x-crystallography are, and how the can be solved. Everybody wanting to start with x-ray structure analysis should read this book at the very beginning.

If you want it in a nutshell then this book is for you. On less than 100 pages Clegg covers the most important basic aspects of X-ray structure determination. Bill Clegg is one of the leading figures in British X-ray crystallography and one of the best educators in the field. "Crystal Structure Determination" is a classic in its own right and a great first text to read if you think you may be interested in crystallography.

Once you got a little deeper into crystallography you may also want to read the following books (I'd recommend to read them in the order given here):
Werner Massa: Crystal Structure Determination
Jenny Glusker / Kenneth Trueblood: Crystal Structure Analysis -- A Primer
Carmelo Giacovazzo: Fundamentals of Crystallography
Peter Mueller: Crystal Structure Refinement -- A Crystallographer's Guide to SHELXL

This text is well-written for the stated purpose of introducing chemistry students to the subject of crystal structure determination. Graduate students as well as advanced undergraduates will find this an outstanding point of entry into the field. The language is mostly very clear, but at times, Clegg presumes too much prior knowledge on the part of the reader. Still, it is a more accessible text than most, being light on mathematics, brief, and written in a (mostly) lucid style.

One specific comment, and this may seem trivial, but it is a truly unbelievable oversight on the part of the publisher: the images on pp. 14-15 are printed in literal black-and-white, not grayscale. Hence, the beginning reader may find Clegg's discussion of diffuse fringes quite confusing, as there are in fact no fringes anywhere on the page. The images look rather like a bad Xerox, which is unfortunate, since they really form a visual foundation for beginning readers.

The book is a perfectly fine text. It's quite understandable and informative. I've had tremendous problems with the index, however. It consists of only one page, and it has thousands of laughable omissions. I can't believe Dr. Clegg (and associates) allowed this book to be published with such a terrible, terrible index. This is a text book, kids. It needs a thorough index.

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