Customer Reviews

Chemical Kinetics and Dynamics (2nd Edition)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Steinfeld's book is an excellent text for those who have a thorough background in Chemical Kinetics and Dynamics. However, for the introductory graduate level kinetics course or advanced undergraduate kinetics course, I would not recommend this text. Steinfeld does not illustrate any of the concepts with actual data or explanatory problems. Furthermore, the problems at the end of the chapter have very little to do with the material they are supposed to cover. Finally, there are many mistakes in this edition. They are mostly typos, but they add a lot of confusion to the material

I would recommend this book only to people who have a very complete background in kinetics and dynamics as a nice reference book.

The content is there but the incredible number of typos in this book often makes it hard to follow the math. The language used in the problem sets are not clear so at times it is hard to decipher what is being asked. There are also many typos in the questions, which makes solving the problems difficult and lowers the usefulness of the problems in helping to learn the material. However, with the help of some reference materials (especially in the Laplace transform section), this book can provide a good basic understanding of chemical kinetics.

As another review said, this book has typos in it. They are not so huge as to impede the progress of one through this text-usually they are minor and easy to figure out if one fills in the one or two (very) trivial steps they usually skip.
The problems at the end of the chapter are excellent in that they require the reader to take the knowledge they have been given and have to apply it to situations they have not been walked through step by step with the authors holding the reader by the hand. This is an advanced undergraduate, graduate student level text and should be treated as such. Though the topic itself is not that challenging they have written an excellent text that will challenge the reader to push the boundaries of their current knowledge.
If you are having a hard time seeing the connection between the problems at the end of the chapter and what preceded said problems, you likely did not understand the material and thus are not ready to tackle the problems.
Read with care and patience, the payoff will be great.

As a graduate student taking kinetics I would definitively recommend this text! Appropriate amount of detail and explains the mathematics behind it all quite well.

This is an excellent book if you know the basis of chemical kinetics. I recommended it especially for university students in
this matter.