Customer Reviews

An Introduction to X-ray Crystallography

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Despite being a new edition, the book is somewhat outdated and many modern concepts or instrumentation descriptions are missing, particularly so for macromolecular crystallography. I bought it largely for completeness of my X-ray literature collection as it is a classic. For rapid overview about general crystallography, the IUCr monograph edited by C. Giacovazzo perhaps is more modern and suitable.

For an undergraduate wanting a first course in crystallography, Woolfson furnishes an eloquent read. The text covers all the salient topics needed for a general understanding of the field. A combination of theory and experiment.

Thus the explanations of the Bravais lattice and the theory of finite groups. With 230 space groups. The 7 basic crystal structures, from orthogonal to trigonal and others, are easy to understand if you follow the descriptions and think in terms of axes of symmetry. The maths level in the book is not too challenging, if you have had a course in quantum mechanics.

The experimental sections of the book deal with how to prepare samples. Single crystal or powder. And then the various apparatus configurations and the resultant data. The analysis of that data is now very highly developed and heavily computational. But the principles of the analysis are straightforward.

Don't worry about the book being 10 years old. It's an introductory text and the gist of the material hasn't changed significantly for decades.