Since a lot of what I have been doing lately is computation and x-ray crystallography, I spend a lot of time leafing through manuals and program documentation for software that is the bread-and-butter of any crystallographic analysis.
Be it cns , coot , phaser , solve-resolve , refmac , pymol , molmol etc etc . they all contribute one small piece of the structure solution puzzle.
Although the online manuals are still are an important source of program information, a cool new development in the online crystallography world are the many new wikis that were started in the last year.
Mostly based on the mediawiki platform, these wikis are constantly updated with crystallographic tips and tricks and plain old documentation by everyone from the creators of these powerful packages to seasoned users and even beginners.
Like many micro-communities on the web, crystallographers have long gathered around the many email-centric news groups. The membership for some of these groups probably numbers in the thousands . Interestingly, some of these wikis were seeded after discussions on these newsgroups. And its quite often that one sees a email discussion summarized as a wiki article. Having just spent three hours to debug the installation of a new crystallographic package, I couldnt be happier.
For a summary of these crystallographic wikis check out this link
Thanks for the post – I didn’t know about the Coot wiki. It might finally get me over the activation energy barrier so I can start learning how to use the program. I’ve been an O devotee for many a year now; while it ain’t perfect, it works for me (mostly)!