In the past, I've always found the IUCr crystallographic pamphlets to be useful when teaching diffraction. They've reorganized their website to make their educational resources easier to find. On this link, you can find the IUCr teaching pamphlets, a short description of how to grow crystals, and other crystallography web resources.
Teaching Pamphlet Topics
The University of Oklahoma has put together a nice website on Crystallography which includes a standard introduction to crystallography & crystal symmetry. I also like some of the features that you don't normally come across including evaluating crystal structures and twinning.
The Interdisciplinary Education Group at the University of Wisconsin Madison Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC) has a fabulous website with a wide variety of great resources for teaching about materials and the nanoworld at all levels. A favorite "corner" of this website that I refer to a lot in my own teaching is the library of so-called Resource Slides on a variety of topics. These Resource Slides are divided up into 36 topical Slide Shows and include wonderful graphics to use in class presentations. Slide Shows include:
House (Inorganic chemistry): The book is divided into 5 parts: first, an introductory section on atomic structure, symmetry, and bonding; second, ionic bonding and solids; third, acids, bases and nonaqueous solvents; fourth, descriptive chemistry; and fifth, coordination chemistry. The first three sections are short, 2-4 chapters each, while the descriptive section (five chapters) and coordination chemistry section (seven chapters covering ligand field theory, spectroscopy, synthesis and reaction chemistry, organometallics, and bioinorganic chemistry.) are longer. Each chapter includes
Here is a fun way to learn about inorganic chemistry! These songs were composed and passed along to me by Tom Mallouk at Penn State with his permission to post here on VIPEr. I Can't Get No Bragg Diffraction was a joint effort put together one year at a Gordon Research Conference on Solid State Chemistry. Sorry, no recording! The tune n-doped, recorded by the Band Edges, covers the electronic structure behind semiconductor devices. Download the lyrics for both and the mp3 file for n-doped! There is a
Miessler and Tarr is an inorganic textbook which is is best suited to an upper-division one-semester inorganic course, though there is more material than can be covered in a single semester, so some choice of topics is necessary. It is very well suited for a course oriented around structure, bonding, and reaction chemistry of transition metal compounds, but is very limited in its treatment of solids, main-group, descriptive chemistry, and bioinorganic. Pchem would be helpful but is not necessary. In particular, the treatment of MO theory is very in-depth. The quality of end-of chapter p