Customer Reviews

X-Ray Structure Determination: A Practical Guide, 2nd Edition

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This book is an excellent excellent introction to the basic physics and math of x-ray crystallography. This was used as the text in an undergrad class I took on protein crystallography and it was perfect for that purpose. The main drawback of this book is that it is really concentrated on small molecule structure determination, and doesn't address the problems or specific techniques used for large protein structures. So probably the best way to use this book would be in conjuction with a more protein-specific book. But for the raw fundamentals of symmetry and diffraction, I don't think you can beat stout & jensen.

With many good graphics, this book explains it all. From the beginning (generation and diffraction of X-rays) to the end (errors and ambiguities of the method), almost everything you ever wanted to know (and more) about the method of X-ray structure determination is explained here.

The approach Stout and Jensen take is a rather theoretical and mathematical one, which does not cater to everybody's preferences. I personally prefer Carmelo Giacovazzo's Fundamentals of Crystallography, but the Stout and Jensen certainly is a classic and a whole generation (and a half) of crystallographers was raised on it.

Unfortunately the book is a little outdated and more recent developments like area detectors are not mentioned. The part on structure refinement is interesting (especially the section on scaling) but hopelessly incomplete. For practical structure refinement go with Peter Mueller's Crystal Structure Refinement -- A Crystallographer's Guide to SHELXL.