Starting with a review of defect classifications based on their displacement fields, this book then provides connections between different dislocation arrangements, including geometrically necessary and statistically stored dislocations, and other common defects and the corresponding changes in the reciprocal space and diffraction patterns. Subsequent chapters provide an overview of microdiffraction techniques developed during the last decade to extract information about strain and dislocation gradients. X-ray microdiffraction is a particularly exciting application compared with alternative probes of local crystalline structure, orientation and defect density, because it is inherently non-destructive and penetrating.