Phasing in crystallography: a modern perspective
keyword disconnected from the introductory example. This would avoid having to read most of a chapter if a rough grasp would be sufficient. For lecturers, the book provides a large number of exercises at the end of each chapter as a pool of ideas for their own teaching. The questions relate well to the topic of the corresponding chapter and vary in level of difficulty to meet different levels of experience and understanding. The book contains the solutions so that students do not need to purchase a separate volume to check their answers. The book is accompanied by a set of programs available free of charge together with data files that one can work through based on instructions in Chapter 13 of the book. Unfortunately, all except one program are only available as compiled Windows binaries and those without access to Windows. Despite all these positive aspects, I cannot recommend buying this book. It is worth having a copy in every crystallography department, although those sections which are good are probably also present in previous editions. The updated sections are by far not as diligently done as those about basic crystallography. Students should be warned that the book contains a vast number of mistakes and while many of them are obvious to crystallographers, students would not be able to distinguish those parts they can trust from those they cannot. My list of errata compiled while reading this book exceeds two pages and are scattered all over the book. Many formulae are wrong, contain typesetting errors. Very puzzlingly many of the cross-references within the book are off, something that would not happen to any modern typesetting system and not to a quality corrector who could have fixed these without any knowledge of crystallography. Hence, partially Springer are to blame that this fifth edition of a conceptionally excellent textbook is not worth its price. As examples, in Section 7.5, the reference to Axel Brungers Rfree points to the Phenix online documentation and the reader is referred to a paper by A.J.C. Wilson from 1976 in order to learn about the Phenix software suite. Page 182 contains a reference to the non-existing Table 3.10. One of the most irritating statements can be found in the introduction to Chapter 6: