Customer Reviews

Essentials of Geochemistry

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

 

 

This book is well-intended, covering a fairly wide array of concepts. However, open the book from either the front or back, and you will find nice large, empty inside front and back covers! This is the first chemistry/physics/engineering text I've encountered with no equations, constants and conversions printed immediately inside the covers(or anywhere else, for that matter)! This one fact makes the book difficult and time-consuming to use for completing homework assignments and learning new concepts. A near total lack of diagrams, charts or graphic representation of concepts is also disappointing.

My prof. utilized this text for the first time last semester, and assumed it would be a good text. My background was Chem I, Chem II, Organic Chem, and Quantitative Analysis. I and a classmate with a similar background both found this text to be ineffective and inefficient. For example, one must page to Chapter 5 before finding a periodic table; every chemistry text I've seen thus far includes one on the opening pages. The treatment of atomic orbital energies was the worst I've ever seen - what introductory texts handle with a few well-chosen diagrams was written out into a page of excruciating text (p 146-147). Equations were given, but it was not always readily clear what each symbol stood for; examples were nearly non-existant. I was so excited about this course and I'm just grateful that the instructor was of much higher quality than the text.

this is a required textbook for a class.
it was less expensive here than the campus bookstore.
the book is like most textbooks, informative.

all aspects of the purchase transaction were satisfactory.