Handbook of Crystallography

Book excerpt: This book resulted from a series of frustrations. Analytical electron microscopy requires exactly what its name implies: quantitative information to conduct an analysis. The frustrations arose when I started hunting for specific forms of equations in a form understandable to a non-crystaHographer, for definitions of subtle concepts related to crystallography, for intelligible interpretations of space group symbols and their significance. What I frequently discovered was that such information was buried in a giant tome and couched in terms familiar to crystallographers but not to electron microscopists in general, or it was located in an old reference not available in my library, or it was found in an out-of-print book, or it was in a Russian book no longer available, etc. So to minimize the frustrations, I started a notebook containing the details, particularly after I had found forms of equations useful for quick calculations or equations in a form useful for proving, doing, or extending calculations found in a reference. The resulting notebook grew to a respectable size, requiring some organizing of the contents. Finally, the size became large enough, and has proven useful enough, to produce the notebook as a book.