This newest addition to the IUCr series of Texts on Crystallography, provides an interesting complement to the two immediately previous issues in the series, i.e. Crystal structure analysis: principles and practice, edited by W. Clegg and Fundamentals of crystallography, second edition, edited by C. Giacovazzo (both also published by Oxford University Press). The book assumes that the reader has an understanding of the fundamentals of X-ray crystallography and contains virtually no theoretical background on this subject, save that required for an explanation of program options. It is essentially intended for the practical crystallographer, and is a highly focused text, dealing, as the title suggests, specifically with crystal structure refinement using George Sheldrick's well known SHELXL program. The book is edited by P. Muller, who is currently Director of X-ray Diffraction facilities, Department of Chemistry at MIT, Cambridge, U.S.A. He has spent many years in the Sheldrick laboratory at Gottingen, and is so eminently placed to write this book. It contains a foreword by George Sheldrick, describing the historical development of SHELX, and eight chapters written by Peter Muller, dealing in depth with topics such as crystal structure refinement, treatment of hydrogen atoms, atom type assignment, disorder, pseudo-symmetry and artefacts. There are also excellent contributions by Regine Herbst-Irmer on twinning and one by Ton Spek on the important topic of structure validation. Though the book is primarily aimed at the small-molecule marked, the SHELXL program is increasingly used for refinement of high-resolution protein data sets. In view of this, there is a chapter by Thomas Schneider on protein refinement, and one by Michael Sawaya on protein structure validation. This book is appropriate for the graduate student, who though perhaps not specialising in X-ray crystallography, desires to have a firm practical grasp of the topic, and of the use of the SHELXL program. It comprises 227 pages of text, with a reasonably extensive bibliography and a list of useful websites (checked on November 24, 2005). The book is well laid out, with many useful figures. My only criticism of the presentation is that the printed line-spacing (in my copy at least) is sometimes variable, giving an unprofessional appearance for certain pages.
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