Customer Reviews

Chemistry: Principles and Reactions (with CD-ROM and InfoTrac)

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

At first glance, this book looks too abstract, geared more towards high school students. Upon closer examination, I found that the book is extremely well-organized and written in the most concise way possible without losing the essence of the subject.

Only other chemistry book that I think is comparable in quality is "Chemistry 2nd ed" by McMurry. However, if you compare side by side, you will see that the exact same materials are generally discussed in much more concise form with no wordy explanations in Masterton's writing.

I think the book received some negative comments from other reviewers because it appears over simplified; however, I think all the important materials are covered extremely well at college-level. If you believe in efficiency, definitely use this book. However, if you want to look/feel sophisticated, scholarly or pretentious, there's a lot of wordy books out there.

I used this text in my AP Chemistry course a couple of years back, and now that I'm in college and planning on taking some physical chemistry courses I decided that having this book as a reference would be good. So I bought the 5th edition of this text for a cent. I distinctly remember this book being great for a couple of reasons. The first is the size.

The reviewer who said that this book must only contain a forth of the information that other textbooks have because it is a forth of the size is clearly mistaken. In my own field of study (math), we know better than to say such nonsense. The reason for this book's slimness is because the authors have taken care to present the material in a precise, clear, and unified fashion, as opposed to dribbling on and describing the same thing five different ways. If you don't believe me, take a look at the table of contents. This book's size is not indicative of the volume of content contained.

Another reason why I liked this book so much is that it gives a unified approach to chemistry. Sections like gasses will often come back and support new sections to provide insight. One example of this is how the authors use the ideal gas law alongside the theory of vapor pressure to properly analyze how gasses and liquids behave together in a a closed environment. The author's do not present a collection of party tricks. The student will never get into the mindset of "ok, i have this type of problem, and so I reference this equation to solve it" without really knowing the material. Another example is that the authors do not present every single variation on the ideal gas law (Charles, Boyle, etc...). Instead, the authors present the ideal gas law in its entirety, and the student sees that all of the others are trivial byproducts when some variables are held constant. By not wasting pages talking about all of those variations, we have a slimmer text that better teaches the student what is "actually" going on.

Another thing I liked about this text is that often they will have a series of examples that are worked out in full detail whenever an important topic is discussed. Part (a) might just be a trivial computation that anyone could solve by reading the text, but part (d) or (e) will be an intricate problem that brings together many topics previously discussed and shows how they all work together to solve an interesting chemical problem. This is good because chemistry itself is not divided up into nice chapters, and it also teaches students to make connections between what they had previously learned and what they are currently learning (hence, this adds to the "unified approach").

The last thing I would like to comment on is the quality and quantity of exercises. I learned that the best way to learn chemistry is to do chemistry. So no matter how well written this text is, it fails if it does not have good problems. Thankfully, the problems in the text are relevant to what you learned in the chapter, and they range in difficulty. There are a great number of problems too, and so if a student is having problem with Gibb's Free energy (for example), then there will be a series of problems that the student can work on if he or she wished to get better. By the end of the problems relating to whatever section they correspond to, the student will no longer have trouble, and I think this testifies to how well this text works. Often, the problems will bring together several branches of chemistry, and there are many interesting problems that are not simply of the "drill and kill" style.

Overall, this is a great text, and I highly recommend it to anyone looking for a great general chemistry education. For those of you who might be thinking that this text is at too low of a level for college, I put my chemistry knowledge against many of my fellow students here at UMich, and my education and understanding beats most of theirs. So I would say that this book if probably better than most of the current ones used in college courses today.

i bought this book to help me pass honors chem in high school cuz it corresponds with our text and was highly recommended. it has a great sort of outline for each chapter where you can take notes in a fill in the blank form, and the stepbystep instructions and problems are great.

Although this book may be useful as a reference, it is a disaster if you are new to chemistry and don't have a professor, who could explain some topics from this book.
In order to understand the book's problems you have to buy separately a solution manual.

I am a UCONN student, where Prof. Masterton and Prof. Hurley are my chemistry teachers. I have to say that this book is very well written, and interesting to read. It explains the priciple in clear and easy to understand fassion, not wordy, not repetitive. The exercises are step by step, and get to the point. The author often makes connection between chemistry and our everyday life. For example, he will expain that sea water is a bit slipery because it's slightly basic. There are some comments that this book is too simple, and not at college level. Well, I'm taking general chemistry course here, with this textbook, and this course is one of the hardest course at UCONN. We judge a book by it's content, not by it's thickness or how pretty the title page is. There are not too many organic stuff here, but most people who is major in chemistry related fields go on to take Organic Chemistry, at here this is the way it is here. This book is supposed to be General introduction to chemistry. And you can certainly get a lot out of it.

This book does a good job of presenting material in a precise manner. Two classes at my college are taught out of this text book and I was amazed at how thin it was. It is not at all a heavy, bulky book but it still does an excellent job of explaining material and providing useful problems.

My professor required this book to give us just the bones of chemistry and to save us money. For the student it is way too short with descriptions and barely any explanations which make it very hard to understand. This is a frustrating book and it results in a frantic student looking for a good tutor. If you are a teacher/professor, please do not try to do your students any favors with this book.

This book is about 1/4 the size of the average Intro/Freshman Chem class, and so is about 1/4 of the information. This book does a DECENT job on BASIC principles of chemistry, but like has been said before, a good chemistry professor might aid in the understanding these principles. If using this book for a Freshman Chemistry class with the intent to move to Organic Chemistry, you might be in a tad bit of trouble.

In short: Too short, little detail. Seems elementary compared to most chemistry books

A bit too complicated for a General Chemistry text, yet it still fails to touch on certain important aspects (steric numbers, among others). The practice problems at the end of each chapter are highly abstract, but may be viewed as somewhat useful when compared to the extremely wordy and complicated study guide. College students studying Chemistry for the first time, especially older non-traditional students, will find the authors' approach to several concepts to be unnecessarily complex. This text is far more useful when accompanied by a study guide such as Houk's Chemistry: Concepts and Problems, A Self-Teaching Guide. The text's study guide is fairly useless unless the instructor pulls tests from the publisher's web suite.

It was not difficult to understand. It was very well written and thought out very well. Students who use this book has no difficult time with it. I would surely recommend it to be used as a teaching tool, and maybe as a reference guide to those who have already had basic chemistry and have already acquired a knowledge of basic chemistry.