About the Course Material

Authors

Much of the course material has been written specifically for the PPS course (before or during last year's run) by a large number of different authors around the world, and in general the material is available at the Web-site where it was written.

Other material existed before PPS happened, and has been very kindly "donated" by the authors. Besides this, the beauty of the WWW is of course that any URL is "a click away", and there are many excellent and useful sites that are not directly related to the course which we will recommend that you examine.

Browsing the Material

The nature of the WWW means that it is quite easy to end up "surfing" even if you hadn't originally intended to do so, so sometimes when you are studying the course material you may find yourself going off at a tangent. We will specifically tell you which URLs ("Uniform Resource Locators", i.e. the sites of files on the WWW) that you should look at.

However, that certainly doesnt mean to say that other sites won't ever be highly relevant to the course. The explosion in Web resources means that it can be difficult to keep up with whats available relating to a particular subject. So you will probably at some time stumble across a very useful URL which we dont know about; in which case tell everyone by using the Discussion Lists. So it will be worth occasionally putting time aside to have a good wander round the Web if you can.

Sometimes we will make a link to just one or two particular sections of a whole library of resources, for example a chapter of a "Hypertextbook". We will try and be as specific as possible about which parts we are referencing in each chapter of the course.

In summary, it will be worth being aware of when you are looking at course material served from Birkbeck Crystallography Department, and when you are somewhere remote to Birkbeck, so that you can easily navigate back to the course pages; keep the "Location" or "URL" displayed on your Web-Browser.

Course Material Index

Last updated 13th Jan '96