Customer Reviews

Physical Chemistry

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

 

 

At first glance David Ball's text is excellent and because of this I used it to teach my physical chemistry course last year. It is nicely written and easy to read. As with any first edition there are numerous typos - but these are posted on Ball's web page as they are found. The basic thermodynamics and quantum mechanics sections are quite good and I especially like the group theory section - but the statistical mechanics, ESR, and NMR sections are quite poor in my opionion and contain numerous errors (not typos) which I discovered only in teaching these topics in the end of the second semester course. I am currently looking for a new text but I eagerly await a second edition in which these errors will be fixed. This book has a lot of potential and for basic thermodynamics and quantum mechanics it is very good.

If you are forced to use Atkins for Physical Chemistry, then do yourself the favor of buying this book. This is by far the best P. Chem. book that I have ever seen. The concepts are clear without watering down the subject. I love this book so much now that P. Chem. finally makes sense to me. I especially love the section on Quantum Mechanics. I use this book primarily as the textbook for my class because it follows closely the material outlined in Atkins stupid, pedantic book.

I used this book for my first P-chem class and found it to be very structured and easy to use. Every P-chem book will have difficult chapters, but I think with the examples and exercises this book is useful as a resource or to accompany the class lectures.

Just finished a 2 sem course in Pchem. Professor assigned this book, but never used it for his lectures, except to make the test questions. I think he purposely chose all of the questions that were worked out wrong, just to frustrate us. He didn't have to look hard to find erroneous questions, the chapters are full of them. The book offered no information to help understand the lectures. As I study for the ACS final, I find that none of the concepts ACS presents are covered in this book in a manner that is useful. I would venture that any P chem book on the market is better than this one. Heck, even Wikipedia is better at teaching Pchem than this waste of trees. If you are assigned this book for a class, (sorry) find another one (book or class).

If you're lost in a sea of tears and dispair because you don't understand PChem, Ball offers you the easiest book there is on Earth to finally get going somewhere. THE PROBLEMS:
-there are a lot of mistakes and typos in this book (be sure to attend your classes and verify with your professor how well you understood everything),
-the topics are treated so superficially that the word "understand" shouldn't be used (if your professor recommends this one is because he doesn't want you to be a competent professional or because he will trow a lot of the rest in class).

The end of chapter problems... are a wonder: easier than opening the book. THE PROBLEM:
- no self-respected professor on earth will ever use these for exams (once you got them go for the classics: Laidler, Levine, Castellan or Atkins).

WHO SHOULD BUY THIS BOOK: anyone who has already failed to pass the course (believe me, if you find this one hard... well... there could be other majors for you to explore).

My P-chem class uses this book. This list of problems is huge. As a student i'm frustrated with this book, and have the following complaints to present to the public.

1) The answer section is full of errors. Of the 20ish problems my professor assignes, about 3-5 depending on the chapter are wrong in the book. I've spent many a night frustrated to the point of burning my book, only to discover that i was right and the book was wrong. I've lost all confidence this books accuracy.

2.) The questions are overly complicated. I understand the importance of being able to apply Kinetics or Thermo and it's relationship with the volume of a gaseous product and temperature, but when I hardly understand the basic relationship of a rate constant- converting units, applying a gas law and applying an integration is more places to have an error and increases frustration. Teach me to crawl before you expect me to run a race!

3) Not enough question per sub-section. I want learn confidently the material. there is not enough questions i feel over each sub section. 1.1, 1.2, 1.3,1.4 etc. Ball just has a few questions over each section at the chapter review. I wish he followed a structure more like a college calculus book, with like, 50+ problems for each subsection AND a chapter review would be better.

4) The book fails to show the relationships of what is going on in a way that conceptually makes sense. Sure it tries to explain the mathematical side of what is going on, but that is it. Conceptually Ball offers little. The best example is an analogy of a mountain climber used to describe state functions. and nothing to explain the relationships of how G, H, T, E. interact with each other aside from their mathematical qualities. AKA, i couldn't explain how these different things relate to each other without using a pen and paper.

5) For $100-$175 price range that this book can go for under the different circumstance (new at bookstore, used online etc) it would be nice to have better printing quality. The two tone print just screams 1980's. It's the 21st century, can i please get color images, and visual aids that don't hurt my eyes under lower light environments! The questions sections is black text printed over gray-blue backdrop. Don't even thing about taking this into %90 of coffee shops and working on it, You'll need to bring a flash light!


Maybe David W. Bell will come up with a better version that has an accurate "selected answers" section, visual aids that contribute to the context, questions with a range of difficulty to build confidence in the subject, references that help conceptualize the relationships of different properties, and it will be printed in a quality way that makes reading the book appealing and possible in more environments than outside in the noon sun!

The book is excellent. It would suffice all the needs to form a good foundation in physical chemistry taught in undergraduate level. However, I felt the problems to be difficult. So I have obtained the complete manual (look my listings for sale). Goodluck with your pchem.

I suppose if I were only a chemistry student, I'd have a higher opinion of this book. But on the whole, being both a physics and chemistry student, I can't really rate it highly.

The problem with the book is that its mathematics is very often wrong. Well, I suppose wrong isn't the correct word. It would be better too say that the mathematics are very often suspect, and appear very wrong. However, upon trying to work it out yourself you discover that to save the poor chemists the trouble of looking at an integral, the book will often simply omit them. This is problematic for those of us who actually like math, or at least appreciate its applications to science.

The other problem with this book is that its explanations are frequently overly wordy. Where 5 lines of math would do, 3 paragraphs are inserted often making you wish they'd just go ahead and do the math instead of having to work through the qualitative explanations contained within.

On the whole, not a bad book, but I have to imagine that there are better alternatives.

The book is just as described. It is a used book but you can't tell. The shipping was very fast and the communicaiton with the seller was great.

I received my book as quickly as can be expected for media mail and the book was in perfect condition! I bought the book for half of what it would cost if it were new.