This book gives an up-to-date treatment of the optics of minerals, from visible to hard X-ray wavelengths - and is the only text/reference to provide all fundamental, as well as applied, aspects related to the structure and symmetry of minerals, along with their optical and optical-absorption spectroscopic properties. It explains how to predict opticamineralogical properties from first principles, and introduces modern techniques for opticamineralogical analysis. The book also addresses crystal field theory, molecular orbital theory, ligand field theory, and others. It contains an excellent chapter on X-ray characterization of mineral groups, and provides reference data X-ray intensities of common minerals (for JCPDS X-ray data can be hard to obtain). The volume has been aimed at geologists, materials scientists and spectroscopists.