XRayView 3.0
Many people that are new to crystallography have a hard time ‘visualizing’ what is occurring between real and reciprocal space. The most intuitive and user friendly program that I have found to help with the problem is XRayView 3.0, which is free to educational institutions.
What concepts does XRayView touch upon?
The software uses an interactive gui to introduce the concepts of X-ray diffraction by crystals, including the reciprocal lattice, the Ewald sphere construction, the wavelength dependence of the reciprocal lattice, primitive and centered lattices, systematic extinctions, rotation photography, space group determination and the alignment of crystals by examination of reciprocal space. Laue cones, photography and group symmetry are also covered with this software.
XRayView is available for IRIX (is anyone still using SGI?), Windows, Linux and Macintosh.
Information about using XRayView can be found here.
The program comes with a number of exercises which are worth working through. In addition, I would recommend simply ‘playing around’ with different parameters, noting the effects of each adjustment. The citation for XRayView can be found here.