Essentials of Crystallography presents a comprehensive study of the essential aspects of crystallography. The topics include a detail discussion of geometry and symmetry of crystals, a simplified approach to derive the point groups and space groups, methods of crystal growth and related theories, imperfections in crystalline solids, various diffraction methods, procedures for solving crystal structures and computing methods in crystallography. Keeping in view the diverse nature of readers, the treatments and the mathematics used in the book have been kept as simple as possible. This book will serve as a textbook to any crystallographic course at the graduate level. In addition, this will be helpful for all researchers in physics, chemistry, biology, mineralogy etc. who are working with crystallography related problems.

This book presents a comprehensive theoretical basis of symmetry representations of molecular vibrations, matrix representation of symmetries, and the elements of group theory that are relevant to other symmetry elements/operations, crystallographic and molecular point groups. The book helps understand the reducible and irreducible representations of symmetry matrices and then derive the normal modes of vibration of different molecules by using suitable techniques independently. Targeted to graduate students and researchers, this book aims not only to derive the normal modes of vibration of any given molecule themselves but also compares and verifies them with the experimentally found modes by using IR and Raman-related techniques. For the first time in the crystallographic history, this book presents the group multiplication tables of all 32 point groups in both international and Schoenflies notations.