I was highly flattered when I was asked by Mark Ladd and Rex Palmer if I would write the Foreword to this Fourth Edition of their book. "Ladd & Palmer" is such a well-known and classic book on the subject of crystal structure determination, one of the standards in the field: I did feel daunted by the prospect, and wondered if I could do justice to it. The determination of crystal structures by X-ray crystallography has come a long way since the 1912 discoveries of von Laue and the Braggs. In the intervening years great advances have been made, so that today it is almost taken for granted that...

Direct methods of crystal structure determination are usually associated with techniques in which phases for a set of structure factors are determined from the corresponding experimental amplitudes by probabilistic calcula tions. It is thus implied that such ab initio phase calculations do not require a knowledge of atomic positions, and this basis distinguishes direct methods from other techniques for structure determination. An acceptably wider interpretation of the term direct methods leads to other important applica tions involving, inter alia, the use of heavy atoms, resolution-limited...