Customer Reviews

Crystallography Made Crystal Clear, Second Edition: A Guide for Users of Macromolecular Models (Complementary Science)

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The second edition of Crystallography Made Crystal Clear contains many improvements over the first edition, especially regarding the introduction of new graphics technology available to everyone that can view this webpage on the internet. Rhodes especially explains how the PDB file works and how to view it to best suit the individual scientist's purpose.

It is important to note that the book is still far from "crystal clear"! The portion of the book dealing with the physics of x-ray diffraction is very mysterious--definately dig out the old college physics textbook and read about diffraction when you find yourself confused. Also, the mathematics presented in the middle chapters of the book are way beyond the level that biochemists must deal with on a regular basis. An understanding of multi-variable calculus is important for these chapters.

Overall, the book is a must-read for anyone interested in structural biology, with the exception of several chapters regarding the mathematics that can be skimmed over. And the webpage associated with the book is an excellent resource.

This is the best introduction to crystallography I have ever come across. Which is quite an achievement because it's a rather complicated subject to study. In crystallography it's very common to find books which deal with either a totally descriptive approach or a totally mathematical approach. Rhodes' book bridges the gap between the two and gives the reader the right dose of jargon and explanation. He illustrates every point with plenty of figures as well as real life computer models of proteins. Before I came across this book, I was struggling and failing to understand Isomorphous Replacement, MAD, Solvent Flattening, Maps and Models, as well as the iterative refining of models. I think no other book comes even close to this book in explaining all these concepts in a simple format. This, I think is as clear as it can get without becoming oversimplified. A must have for all researchers and students whose work is connected to crystallography in any way; this would include crystallographers themselves, biochemists and molecular biologists and computational chemists.

Buy "Biomolecular Crystallography" instead. This book tries to condense too much information on too few pages. I didn't understand everything in "Biomolecular Crystallography", but the sections that I did understand, are very well written. It's more expensive, but it's a better book, for those that really want to understand crystallography beyond various tutorials on the internet and "Crystallography Made Crystal Clear".

While Crystallography made Crystal Clear by Gale Rhodes is certainly easy to read, it oversimplifies things and introduces a few inaccuracies. It falls short to make the student really understand crystallography, which, in my opinion, is not a good thing for a textbook. On the other hand, I have made the experience that, unfortunately, many students are happy with only a superficial knowledge of the basic theory (I have been teaching crystallography for about a decade now) and this book helps with this attitude.

My advice: if you just want to pass the class and don't care about the subject, go with this book. If, however, you really want to understand what crystallography is about, you need to read either the great beginner's book by Werner Massa: Crystal Structure Determination or the more protein crystallography oriented but equally great beginners book by Jenny Glusker and Kenneth Trueblood: Crystal Structure Analysis -- A Primer. Once you have digested the Massa or the Glusker/Trueblood, you can work your way through the book edited by Carmelo Giacovazzo: Fundamentals of Crystallography.

After reading and understanding the Massa or Glusker/Trueblood and the Giacovazzo, you'll be ready to survive a discussion with any crystallographer any time. (What is more: you will enjoy the discussion!) The book by Gale Rhodes, however, will only get you over the exam and you'll miss out on the great fun crystallography can be.

EDIT on 12/12/2010:
A new edition of the Glusker Trueblood has come out: Crystal Structure Analysis: A Primer. The classic has been brought up-to-date and there really is no excuse any more for reading any other introductory textbook than the Glusker/Trueblood. Especially not the book by Gale Rhodes.

When it comes to this field of research, you get two types of references: (1) the 2-5 page quick intro that leaves you with the most basic overview of crystallography and (2) the 'hard core' books that go into such detail as to leave you breathless. This book is, in my opinion, the best transition book.

For non-crystallographers, this book will teach enough about crystallography to allow you to read crystal structure articles and understand what is meant by all of the used statistics and such.

For apprentice crystallographers, this is a wonderful intro into the field. Master the book, then move on to harder books to master it.

Highly recommended. I still go back to it, when I teach people, to help me explain in the way that Gale Rhodes does!

This book is great for people who are just starting biological macromolecular crystallography. It is detailed enough to familiarize the reader with the nomenclature, yet simple enough so that beginners can grasp the process well. I recommend it to advanced undergraduates and graduate students who are interested in protein X-ray crystallography.

My lab is a crystallography lab. We call this "The Book" and hand it off to clueless new students who're starting to wonder just what exactly they've gotten themselves into and are deathly afraid of getting slaughtered by crystallography questions in their orals. The approach is very qualitative, which might be irritating to some, but bear in mind that many crystallographers are coming in from biology backgrounds and we just haven't had the mathematical training to grasp the quantitative approach and it's really, really rough to throw the structure factor equation in the face of a first-year grad student with a B.S. in biology (like I was when I began) and expect them to get it. The Book is a way to break it to us gently. If you want to understand what crystallography is and what crystallographers do, this is the book to read. If you want to be an actual crystallographer, this is a good place to start. Not everything a crystallographer needs is here but it's a good lead in to the math and physics and general voodoo involved in macromolecular crystallography.

A readable overview, superb for getting a feel for how crystallography works and what the results mean. There is also an excellent section on judging the quality of an atomic coordinate file, such as a PDB file you may download. Prof. Rhodes is now completing a second edition.

The perfect bridge between simple introductions and more complete books, both difficult to understand for the non-crystallographer. Very clear explanations -crystal clear- and real examples from real papers. Just what I wanted to know. No more no less.

This book is a good one. Explains every aspect I always want to know about crystallography. In my first class of biochemistry I discover that I really like the macromolecular models, but my biochemistry book doesn't content much information about this subjet. When I discover this book I bought it, and read it, and I must to say that this book explain every aspect of the process of create a molecular model.
After read this book I thinking about to become a crystallographer.