Customer Reviews

Modern Raman Spectroscopy: A Practical Approach

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4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
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The big strength of this book is that it's a good single-volume coverage of the current technology involved in the method, including ultrafast laser systems for CARS etc. The chapter that surveys applications is also fairly well-done. The coverage does not provide enough information to make useful conclusions on choice of specific equipment, or even questions such as "would I be better served with visible-light excitation and a good CCD, or a FT instrument?"

The rest of it... well. It's simply not very well written - organization is poor, even within a given paragraph. Information is repeated multiple times; I saw the same sentence (about the need to pick a good baseline when doing quantitative work) on three consecutive pages - and in no case do they provide a good example of a well-chosen baseline. They mention apodization of FT spectra, but they do not explain or define it. They talk about work on standardizing instruments (esp. for quantitative/intensity purposes), but they wander back and forth between "it's very seldom done" and "it's not been studied much" and "it's been satisfactorily addressed" and "it's very nearly a solved problem". (As another example, there's a figure showing FT-Raman spectra of indene at several different excitation powers; the text claims that there's a non-linear power dependence for the relative peak intensities, but the figure suggests the opposite.)

Sentence fragments are common, and at least two figures have typos. Was there a proof-reader?

Paragraphs also contradict each other: They say that "the SMOOTH function" (yes, apparently there's only the one) is a useful tool for bringing out weak features; that it's extremely dangerous because it obscures detail; that it's an excellent way to remove noise. On the basis of those paragraphs, the reader is left with very little indication of whether "the SMOOTH function" should be used or not. They (attempt to) cover the relevant theory, but again, it's poorly arranged and winds up obscuring more than it explains.

As a review of Raman since 2000 (McCreery's book), it's somewhat useful. They do provide extensive references, so it's perhaps an effective set of pointers on where to start reading.

It is not "the perfect book on Raman spectroscopy"; it is not even a very good one. In particular, I cannot see it useful as an introduction to Raman. (I'd hoped to suggest it as a supplement to a class I'm teaching in the fall; I'm glad I read it before giving it to students!) Their idea for the book was good; perhaps a second edition will be more useful.

For doing Raman, this is the book to have handy. If you want to learn the theory, read Born's Dynamic Theory of Crystal Lattices, there's a chapter in there on Raman, and Einstein, and it refers to Einstein's Brownian motion thesis, which is a Dover classic. If you go back to read Born, then you may follow in the footsteps of Raman, Einstein, Debye, Casimir, Van der Waals, etc.

This book gave good background on the technique and fundamentals of SERS. It really is a practical approach for how to add SERS into a lab to use in different experimental set-ups. However, there is no discussion on TERS, which is a large part of modern Raman.

I have searched for the perfect book on Raman spectroscopy which would be short and complete. After looking high and low, I must recommend this text to everyone who want an explanation detail by detail. The concepts are handled quite nicely so that anyone with basic physics and chemistry understanding will comprehend. Also, there are plenty of examples of compounds which makes analysis easier to identify different bonds and vibration modes. Keep this handy with you and treasure it forever. This one is a keeper.