Customer Reviews

Chemical Principles

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This is the book my prof had us use for GenChem (129) my freshmen year of college. The book isn't the best I have seen and if I hadn't had a really rigorous prep in AP Chem I would have been lost in the reading. I didn't think the book was very clear with the formulae. It spent a lot of time explaining how a formula was derived, a student should have an understanding of the reasoning for the formula (or George Berkeley will yell), but this text does not give the formula and what all the variables are at once point. This makes review and looking up formulae rather labourous. The text misses a few important ideas (intensive vs. extensive properties) but spends a rather excessive amount of time on "present sources of energy" in an attempt, I presume, to relate the text to daily life. The data in the back of the book doesn't match up with a good deal of the data I have encountered elsewhere (while the difference isn't huge, it is present). Also, this may be because I came from a background where strict usage of sig figs was required, no points could be awarded if there were mistakes in the sig figs, I have noticed that the text plays rather "loose" with the sig figs. Also, it has comments like "We are keeping track of the sign value for this number in our heads." Furthermore, some of the vocab usage is off from what it should be (i.e. "All values are assumed precise to at least plus/minus 1." is noted on the list of thermodynamic data, it means the data is accurate, how close to the "true" value, and not precise, how close the tests are to one another). These are all minor problems, but proper use of vocab and sig figs are vital to the ability of a student to communcate properly and therefore I feel that the text should provide a model for the student.

Of the GenChem textbooks I have used, I vastly prefer Chemistry : The Central Science by Brown, LeMay and Bursten.