Customer Reviews

Inorganic Chemistry (Instant Notes (Springer))

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

 

 

This book is pretty much what it claims to be - a book of summary notes for topics in Inorganic Chemistry. It's rather well-written and attempts to break-down concepts into easy-to-understand summaries.
It's best used in conjunction with your textbook. I would read the chapter in the textbook (we used Housecroft's book) and then read the corresponding topic summary in this book to simplify and reinforce the ideas. I also used it to review before exams instead of re-reading the chapters in the textbook.
You can get this book used here on Amazon at a very reasonable price, so it's hard to go wrong picking this book up.

im a chemistry major going for my bachelor's degree. i work 30 plus hours a week in my junior year to pay my way throuhg college by going part time. i needed soemthing to help explain the ambiguous. this book does just that. you take for example point groups. the textbook (huheey) provided a so-so explanation but the lecture power point notes rocked, but wernt succinct. cox made point groups pretty easy to understand while consolidating the material into a short, five page summary. the summary helped me out immensely. also, i use this book here to help review for exams and cox gives good summaries on concepts covered in class and in the textbook . overall, a very good supplement for anyone taking inorganic.

The book is meant for basic inorganic chemistry with previous basic understanding of concepts. The book lacks of good examples and cases that allows better understanding of the subjects and/or speed up the learning curve. The index is not complete, some key words are missing and it is necessary to scan through the text, so if it used as a fast consultation book you may find some difficulties. Some explanations are too short, not even at the Wikipedia level (in completeness) so why to have such a book if wiki is better?. Saying that still I believe it helps and there are positive outcomes, is readable and in some topics, like redox applications and so on the content is at a good level, which is not always the case. So it is an average book that can be a complement but certainly it is not a main stream book in chemistry education.