Dear Theresa, My answer would be - it depends.
If you are in the business of learning crystallography, then I would absolutely suggest you start from doing everything by hand. Indeed, if you really want to get "stuck in" I would suggest starting with the programs you need (mosflm, scala, truncate etc) and scripts so you can get a proper idea what the programs are doing. There is of course CCP4i, but this can "hide" some of the details which may be instructive to know about. If however you're in the business of getting on with biological research, well I would say that automated tools (be they for data reduction or phasing / model building) are exceedingly useful. If you can find the time, I would always encourage people to do things with automation and by hand, to allow comparison of the results. If nothing else this may give you confidence in the automation software. Best wishes, Graeme On 17 February 2012 11:31, Theresa H. Hsu <theresah...@live.com> wrote: > Dear crystallographers > > I would like to get some opinion. For someone beginning to learn basic > crystallography including indexing, scaling ..., should I start with > automated tool like Xia2? Or is manual method for each step better for > learning? > > Thank you. > > Theresa
