Customer Reviews

Introduction to Crystallography (Dover Books on Chemistry)

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

 

 

This book is definitely a good starting point to learn Crystallography. As a matter of fact the title is in my opinion a little misleading since the book really introduces the reader to X-ray Crystallography... The book starts with a concise yet elementary discussion of crystal lattices, point groups and space groups. The chapters are nicely woven together so that the reader easily develops a sense of continuity as the the concepts are introduced. Principles of diffraction phenomena and determination of atomic positions are very densely discussed. However the treatment is "crystal" clear and no vital details are ignored for the sake of "simplicity". The overall treatment is very elementary and requires an extremely modest amount of mathematical background. Fourier series a briefly introduced in the discussion of electron density and structure factors in an effective manner. The effect of glide planes and screw axes on the structure factor (systematic absences) are elegantly described in the examples. I wish D. Sands would have written an longer book and have included more material in structure determination as well as powder diffractometry itself (that's why the books is rated 4 stars only). He certainly has the ability to effectively get the points across throughout his book in a elegant fashion making the book easily readable. The book is ideally suited for those who would like to make their first steps into X-ray crystallography. In addition, the price is so right (as is the case with all Dover Series) you can not go wrong. I highly recommend it.

This book is an excellent introduction to crystallography. If you aren't interested in group theory, which most material scientists aren't, this is the book for you. The book covers the international crystallography notation well, describes some x-ray diffraction and reciprocal lattice topics, and overall conveyed the topics better than some professors can.

For the price, I highly recommend picking this up!

A very helpful book for studying the course of X-ray diffraction or solid state chemistry, whose content is clearly and easy to understand.

This is a nice little book covering basic crystallography. Weighing in at a paltry 165 pages, Sands covers crystals, symmetry, groups, and experimental crystallography. Although brief, he is not overly concise (a good thing for an introductory text). He goes into enough detail to get you the basic idea with out bogging you down in the details. For example, most scientists and engineers could care less about group theory; Sands gives the rigorous mathematical definition of a group and then steps immediately back into discussing how they help us as crystallographers. The explanations are, for the most part, lucid and easy to follow. The diagrams are thought out pretty well and help the discussion. The chapters are speckled with short exercises for you to test yourself.

I would strongly recommend this book if you need a crash course or refresher in crystallography, or as a supplement to other books.

This is a classic and a must have for any Materials Science and Engineering student. For the price you can't get a text in the subject as good as this one. I strongly recommend supplementing this text with a undergrad structures class.

Together with Group Theory and Chemistry this book makes a good guide to the world of chemical,and geological crystals. Crystalography has a very bad notation problem between Schoenflies symbols for point groups and Hermann-Mauguin symbols for space groups ( and several other types of notation that are used like Miller indices). A basic grounding in symmetry groups used in point groups helps to understand the unit cell symmetries used in space groups. Both of these books fails in the larger Mathematical picture of Lie algebras for two and three dimensions. One can't reward a book or author for making his students intellectual cripples when faced with the more general mathematical groups.