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...