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I feel like I'm reading something from the Enlightenment era where every sentence is three times longer than necessary. Poor job handling theories and background to various ideas. Bad diagrams (black and white), poor unit notation, and terrible sentence structure. I had the unfortunate experience of having to use this book. Don't buy this book unless you have no other options. Equations are derived for pages, however, the actual easily usable form of the equation is never hightlighted or boxed to direct your attention to the most important equation. It's poorly formatted which leaves the reader at a disadvantage before even trying to study from it. The chapters on quantum chemistry and laughable.
If your math is weak, there are sections to review and explain what you might not know. This book is totally awesome. Physical chemistry is not an easy subject to understand, but with this book, its get a whole lot easier, and funner. I have read this book for my class so far and have gotten better grades immediately. we are currently using Atkins, which does not even compare to this book. This book has all the right information presented in a very clear manner.
Highly recommend. It's great. It's quite in depth, though you have to accept some parts of the math if you don't already know differential equations.It's understandable even to me, and the last chem course I took was just AP, but it's also very challenging and in depth.
PCHMI (Thermo-C) PCHMII (Q. Good luck. Mechanics-B) For those students who are REQUIRED to derive everything on their PCHM exams, THIS IS THE BOOK FOR YOU. Excellent supplement to that weak and required text book of yours, for sure.
It looks like it was written in the 70's. I hate this book with a passion. So you're constantly having to turn back pages and entire chapters just to find out what stupid equation they are talking about. I will say as a side-note that it's very much worth getting the solutions manual if you get this book. Another bad thing about this book is that they made an update to it and added two chapters but didn't change the ISBN. This is one of the poorest textbooks I've ever owned.
From thereon, they refer to that equation as "equation 17-1" or whatever number they designate it. It has crappy black and white illustrations,and instead of writing fractions like ft/sec or mol/L they write ft*sec(-1) and mol*L(-1) and it gets quite distracting when they have several terms in the denominator. It is wordy yet it explains very little. So some people get the newer version with the correct number of chapters and some people will pay the same price for the book missing at least 2 chapters that they will need in their p-chem class (this happened to my girlfriend who has the older book and I have the newer one and we didn't discover this until the fourth test). The solutions manual is pretty well-done. And there is one really annoying aspect to this book:The authors only ever introduce an equation once in the text.
They also embed all the important tables within random chapters instead of being in an appendix, so good luck finding any constants or any other figures that would be put in a table.
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