Customer Reviews

Chemistry: A General Chemistry Project of the American Chemical Society

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

Even if you're a student who wants to "discover" knowledge, there's no way you'd bother using this book. It delves into the surface levels of topics, and horribly at that. Its explanations are terrible, and are based on data that you should have collected from experiments you're supposed to perform. And that's fine, if you've got test tubes, pipettes, turpentine and potassium pemanganate lying around in your dorm room. Or how about well plates, ferric thiocyanate, materials to make a salt bridge and a pair of electrodes? Oh, you don't? Darn. Well, good luck trying to make sense of the rest of the chapter.

Some of us would like to have an idea what we're doing before we go about potentially performing an experiment. Even if you're a student who's trying their hardest in chem, this book will be sure to hinder you with its innumerable errors.

This book gave such a terrible, inconcise explanation of molecular orbitals that our professors had to photocopy explanations from other textbooks in order to give us (all 782 students) a better explanation.

It's absolutely awful. Be sure to have a better textbook to study from, such as Brown and LeMay's "Chemistry: The Central Science." It's more in-depth AND far more interesting to read.

This text covers basic chemical principles in the context of important molecules. It does not spoonfeed students chemical "knowledge." Rather, it encourages students to "discover" knowledge with their peers by participating learning activities. Students who have no desire of understanding chemistry might be better off with a more traditional text so that they can "get by" with a "D" in chemistry and forget about it. Teachers who only want to go through the motions should also avoid this text. However, those who are willing to take some risk to really learn and teach chemistry should give this text a try.

If I could give this book zero stars, I would, but that's not an option.

Here's the breakdown:

Pros: more introduction to organic chemistry and (if this is what you're into) more references to medical applications of what you're learning; this book also, in a certain type of student, could be inspiring in that it tries to make one figure things out for oneself, rather than simply giving the information outright

Cons: Where do I begin? For one, this book *cannot* be used as a reference, because it doesn't actually have In the hands of a professor who teaches his/her course according to the book, then some of the teacher exercises actuallyIf you miss a lecture, it will hurt much more than with a real chemistry book. If you like to read ahead and learn for yourself before the professor covers the material (as I do), then you're again out of luck. The worst, though, beyond all these things... and OBJECTIVE measure of this book's flaws rather than issues dealing with my own personal preference... is that a good deal of it is WRONG. My professor refused to use *at all* the chapters for Electrochemistry and Chemical Kinetics (I believe this book refers to it as "Reaction Pathways"). He said, and I quote directly: "There are just too many incorrect assertions in these chapters. I'd like to think that a book put out by my society [ACS], even if it has to be arranged and written poorly, would at least be scientifically accurate."

So, if you learn from this book, you'll be learning a lot of chemistry and in a novel way. But you'll also be learning incorrect things as well. And given that I'm assuming most people needing this book don't already know chemistry, it is impossible to sift out the bad from the good.

The Chem 1 chapters are all fairly decent, though, because that material is all fairly basic... but again they are arranged in an illogical manner and it is impossible to truly "figure things out" in an axiomatic way. If I had not already taken IB Chem in highschool, I would have been utterly lost when trying to work in advance. And on top of that, it really lacks the detail that books like Chang's have... for instance it hardly even covers antiboding orbitals!

In essence, in my point of view, even one of this book's best aspects (making you think before you get), do little more than to cloud, confuse, and waste time. And, on top of that, there are plenty of bad aspects, including being wrong on certain fundamental scientific facts.

Get Chang. Seriously. That's what our professor has us use despite this schools' Chem Department's insistence on this one. If you really really really want a general chemistry text that emphasizes (at least more so than the others) medical applications of chemistry, and primes you (at least a little) for Orgo and Biochem, then my advice is to at most buy this book used and as cheaply as possible as an *additional* resource to a true chemistry text.

*Not a book for independent studies
*Not a book for those who enjoy details
*Not a book for a quick, intense course (such as a summer course)
*Not a book for people who take Chemistry seriously
*A good book for one who wants a glimpse of Chemistry in a novel way, and who likes to spend hours thinking about things they cannot possibly surmise rather than getting the information

I had to use this book for 2 semesters. Well, "use" is not even correct, since I barely looked at it; that's how good it was. I tried reading through it for the first semester, but it was no use. There's no cohesiveness to it at all, and it's very frustrating that there isn't a working index. I gave up trying to make any sense out it. Our professor used it for his outlines for his lectures and took pictures and graphs out of it. Other than that, didn't really use it.
Next semester, my professor used the problems at the end of each chapter to prepare for quizzes and tests, and that was about it.
I haven't read any more of the book since the first couple weeks of the first semester. Did I need it to succeed in class? No.
It's a terrible book, and I am glad that I will never need to use it again.
I'm so glad I didn't pay full price for this book. Amazon marketplace for the win!

This book, even at it's high points is pointless. It's a jumble of information put forth for the reader to understand in some magical way. I'm almost certain that even a Chemistry Professor couldn't understand what this book says. It gives information relying on the investigate this and consider this problems before a section, but if we don't have the possibility to do these or understand them we are totally lost after. The worst part about this whole book comes down to the end of chapter problems. The problems themselves are coherent enough, but the answer section is absolutely useless. I am not one of those who wants the answers in the back of the book to copy for my homework because homework isn't graded for my class. I am a person who likes to check their answers against the actual answers to see if I need more work on the problem. The answer section consists of random answers for problems, usually numerical values, that sometime show up. There is no pattern (odd answers/even answers), only random problems will have answers and some parts of the problems will be answered. To conclude, as a second semester General Chemistry student, I feel this book is absolutely useless and if I were you I would run for the hills if your told to buy this for you class. Nothing against the ACS, just my opinion from struggling through two semesters using this useless waste of paper.

As an educator, I'm 100% aligned with the theoretical foundation of this book. Sadly, in practice - in students' hands - it's awful.

My review is based on reading the first chapter, attempting about 1/2 of the end-of-chapter problems, and observing students' efforts to read and apply this text; I believe that this is a sufficient sample size to make an assessment of this text.

I have found definitions that are ambiguous or vague so that students could apply the text's definition and be completely wrong. For example, page 11 indicates that "A compound is a substance whose molecules are all the same...". By this definition a student could reasonably infer that oxygen (O2) is a compound. This is, of course, incorrect.

There are descriptions and examples of how to perform common general chemistry tasks that often lack a clear and systematic outline of HOW do to these tasks. Drawing Lewis structures and determining molecular polarity fit into this category. I have observed that reasonably bright college students with no previous chemistry background (such as high school chemistry) are unable to draw a Lewis structure or determine molecular polarity when provided the text alone.

Students find the idea that an atom is roughly spherical and the region occupied by valence electron pairs to also be spherical to be very confusing. Note that there are almost no models or figures that imply that these electron pairs occupy spheres; in fact, they are generally represented by "sticks" or lines.

At least one term - "phase" - has been introduced without any definition. Again, students without a high school chemistry background have no idea of what this term means.

If you are a student, and you are forced to use this book, I would strongly suggest that you find an additional text to help you succeed in General Chemistry: the textbooks by Zumdahl and/or Tro, for example.

This book is the most difficult text to learn from that I have ever used. If you have to get this book for your class prepare to use another text book to help you with the majority of your learning. The book is set up to make you perform micro-experiments and then use that data to learn the topics of the chapter. It cannot be used as a reference book at all, and does a very poor job helping you work out problems. Stay away from this book.

This "project" of the ACS can barely qualify as a textbook. It is full of errors and inconsistent. The book does not read well at all. The examples are very poor. They explain a lot of concepts through experiments that you are suppose to conduct. But most people don't have the tools or the time to perform the experiments and they do not even offer to explain what would have happened and what you should have learned.

I have to use this textbook for my college general chemistry class. Everyone in my class just uses the book by Raymond Chang in conjunction with this one.

If you are teaching chemistry, please do not torture you students by selecting this text for your class. If you are a student, I'd suggest using the Chang book.

this book is the devil. i prefer my chemistry spoon fed. a book were you could "go through the motions" and "get by" would be just fine unless you actually CARE about chemistry which i am assuming is a rather small percentage of the population