Crystallography Made Crystal Clear: A Guide for Users of Macromolecular Models

The book came in very good condition. The delivery took a few more days than I was expecting but it came in enough time for it to be helpful. Overall it was a good purchase for a good price and i'd buy from the seller again.

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.

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.

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!

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.