The basics of crystallography and diffraction. (Second edition.) By Christopher Hammond. (IUCr Texts on Crystallography, No. 3.) Pp. xv + 331. Oxford: International Union of Crystallography/Oxford University Press, 2001. Price £22.95 (paperback), ISBN 0 19 850552 3; £49.95 (hardback), ISBN 0 19 850553 1.

The first edition of this text was reviewed in this journal by Professor Abraham Clearfield [Acta Cryst. (1998), A54, 1037–1038]. This second edition has been expanded by some 80 pages and goes a long way toward meeting the several legitimate criticisms of the first edition made by Professor Clearfield. Thus, Chapter 4, dealing with crystal symmetry and point and space groups, has been revised and expanded to take account of the use of Volume A of International Tables for Crystallography.

The material in Chapters 9 and 10 of the first edition has been rearranged and expanded to add the topics of X-ray and neutron diffraction from simple ordered metal–alloy crystals, including the representation of preferred orientation (texture or fabric). Two new chapters have been added, one dealing with electron diffraction and its applications and the other with the stereographic projection and its uses.

Some minor defects remain in this much improved book. Unit cells of simple close-packed structures are still incorrectly defined in Chapter 1 and confusingly illustrated in Figs. 1.5 and 1.6, and u, v and w are still retained in the old style as real-space positional coordinates in Chapter 9, as opposed to their current usage as descriptors in Patterson space.