I am privileged to write the Foreword to this fifth edition of Ladd and Palmer's Structure Determination by X-ray Crystallography, a textbook that is now world renowned and that has helped educate two generations of crystallographers in the theory and practice of modern crystallography, myself included. Indeed, a well-worn first edition of this venerable text remains on my shelves today, now somewhat battered and bruised from passage through the hands of successive students who have learned the fundamentals of crystallography from its pages.