Customer Reviews

Principles of Protein X-ray Crystallography (Springer Advanced Texts in Chemistry)

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Jan Drenth is an old school protein crystallographer who has seen the evolution of the field right from its inception in the 1950s to the present day. He belongs to the era when Protein Crystallography was dominated by people with serious math and physics skills like Maurice Wilkins, Rosalind Franklin, Francis Crick, Max Perutz and John Kendrew. Owing to the lack of good computers in those days, all the calculations had to be done by hand and there was no way you could solve a protein structure if you didn't know what a Fourier Transform was. The situation is very different nowadays where, thanks to computers, even a person who doesn't know how to differentiate a function can solve protein structures.
Understandably, owing to the author's experiences and background, this book is an excellent one for people interested in the real math behind protein crystallography. It is much on the lines of the other classic book by Blundell and Johnson, also crystallographers belonging to the same era as Jan Drenth. It is quite full of mathematics and therefore, is not recommended for biologists or chemists with weak math skills. For such people I would recommend other introductory books on the subject written by Gale Rhodes, David Blow and Alex McPherson. A good approach would be to learn the basics from these intoductory books and 'graduate' to Drenth's book later.

Best introductory text for macromolecular xray crystallography. Simple and succinct mathematical explanation of basic concepts. It provides enough background for students to start a research project.

I bought this book when I was first learning crystallography as a first year grad student. This book was ok in some parts but most of it was over my head. I could tell it had some great information but I just needed more of a background to understand the information that it offered. There are more basic crystallography textbooks out there I was referred to later by some crystallographers.

I used this text book for an introductory graduate class in X-ray Crystallograhy. After taking a semester of X-ray Crystallograhy (which is labeled as a Chemistry and Biochemistry course), I can say that the material is mainly based on physics and mathematics. I can't say that this text helped a great deal for my course. The text does not explain relevant points such as Miller indices, symmetry elements, or space groups clearly or in much depth. Instead, it spends too much time explaining concepts mathematically and deriving equations. It also does not contain any relevant practice problems, which are needed to understand Crystallography and practice for exams.

X-ray Crystallography is a very dense subject, and is not a course to take on a whim. I would not reccomend taking a course on Crystallography unless you have a really intense interest in pursuing research in that area. If you are interested in this area, do not buy this text even if it is required for your course. Take a look at Crystallography Made Crystal Clear by Gale Rhodes. That book is much clearer, though also lacks sufficient practice problems.