New and noteworthy on symmetry and solids…

For a couple of years since I got my self interested in computational crystallography, I have been voraciously searching for a nice and updated account of crystallography and rarely found anything worth mentioning so far except for Bradley and Cracknell`s  Mathematical Theory of Symmetry in Solids, but come on…It is rare, hard to find and it was published in 1972! Apparently the physicists, as a community, while never getting tired of stressing the importance of symmetry in condensed matter systems (The so called first law of condensed matter physics is essentially about symmetry breaking…) conspiciously overlooks the structural symmetries.  For instance,from my humble experience there is no graduate level solid state/condensed matter course who rigorously fills this gap at MIT. They just describe the fundamentals of crystallographic indexing, the concept of reciprocal space and pertinent basis construction, some simple prototoypes and that`s it. Also absolutely no mention or whatsoever in how would those symmetries translate into electronic structure and the computation of band structures. I have never seen anyone teaching, at any level, the orbifold notation, cohomology and/or fourier space crystallography. The latter might be hard to integrate into a rather standardized solid state/condensed matter curriculum but a general coverage of the former (that is crystalline symmetries) is still a must. Oh by the way, there is not a single solid state text  in existence that does justice to this topic, not a single one… Ashcroft-Mermin and Marder  both give sketchy accounts of point group symmetry and almost no mention of space groups. Kittel sucks in this aspect as well (as it does in many cases expect for the treatment of reciprocal space maybe) and basically skips it. Grosso & Parravicini, as my favourite text as “the” long waited replacement to Ascroft-Mermin at the moment also simply ignores any mentioning of symmetry. Animalu(treats groups in an appendix) and Kaxiras are both better than the rest but does not fill the particular gap in its entirety. So physicists side is quite hopeless it seems! Now there have been two recent books published and when read together, they perfectly fill the absence of nice texts at least from more of a materials scientists point of view. First one is by Gregory Rohrer , Structure and Bonding in Crystalline Materials and does a very nice job of introducing symmetries and their effect on the deciphering of x-ray data as well as some basic structural phenomena like the bonding and stability. But where it shines mostly is its nice coverage of structure prototypes in detail which is extremely relevant to the current trend of materials informatics and structure prediction.The other book is by McHenry and De Graef and bears the title; Structure of Materials: An Introduction to Crystallography, Diffraction and Symmetry. This is even a deeper book in its coverage of symmetry and group theory. It is cogently written, very well illustrated and needless to say rather complete(although not as mathematical as Bradley & Cracknell).  So it looks like the only viable option is to supplement solid state readings with these two praiseworthy recent launches and personally build the missing connections…. But I salute the authors, all of whom are from Carnegie Mellon for their efforts in both cases, while reserving my disappointment with the book market on solid state theory which is mostly populated with reduntant books. I wish I could see why.