Customer Reviews

Physical Chemistry

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(11)

 

 

This is an excellent text for serious and independent students of physical chemistry looking for interactive learning experiences. It is not for dabblers, but for the preparation of future practitioners in the field. The book maintains a balance between presenting the material in the text outright and asking the student to participate in his/her own understanding of physical chemical principles by a "discovering by doing" philosophy. If you cannot stand a "fill in the blanks" sort of Socratic method in a book, then this is probably not your cup of tea. But for people who want to thoroughly understand the material on a very detailed level, this is one of the best teaching techniques around. Having taken the course offered by Silbey and used this text for that undergraduate physical chemistry course, I can say that no other method serves the student as well in giving the student an opportunity for an intuitive understanding of the material. If you are serious about understanding this material beyond throwing down the equations and crunching the math, it will be well worth taking Silbey and Alberty's lead on this strong introduction and journey through PChem.

The preface states that "The objective of this book is to make the concepts and methods of physical chemistry clear and interesting to students who have had a year of calculus and physics. Well I have had 2 years of Calculus and 1 year of calc-based physics. What the preface should say is that it will be clear and interesting to a mathmatics and physics professor. This book makes quantum mechanics more inaccessible than ever. I am relieved to read that other students are also overwhelmed by the presentation style of this book.

This is an excellent book if you have a good background in chemistry. It is both a text and reference book. This combination may confuse some readers who are interested in "just the facts" and not the big picture behind the structure of P Chem. Many readers may be overwhelm by the amount of information. As students mature over time and begin to understand the structure of chemistry they will better appreciate the details presented and see the coherence of the topics in this book. In short, if you basically have your general chemistry textbook memorized and truly understand those topics, then this P Chem book will be very good for you and the light bulb will come on and you'll say "oh, that is why".

This book is required for a P Chem class I am going to be taking soon. I read the previous reviews before I bought it and I thought, well maybe those people were not interested in science. I thought this book could not be that bad. Well guess what!
I was WRONG. I bought it and I read several sections in it, about stuff that I am interested in.
This book is absolutely a complete horror.
Terrible presentation, no color (that I can forgive but still), too much gratuitous text. It is the kind of textbook that instead of explaining the material and showing short and concise mathematical proofs, tells you why it is so complicated and why it is difficult to understand.
The equations pop out of nowhere, which is unacceptable for a scientific text. Why don't they show complete mathematical proofs of what they are presenting????
Just show me one or two lines with equations showing how you derived that stuff, dammnit!! I don't care how difficult it is to understand. It takes two lines of equations to show stuff that they are not able to show in 10 pages of text!

This book will not aid your study in P Chem. It will just confuse you further. What I find funny is the fact that the beginning of the book states that this book will make P chem accessible to anyone who has had a normal year of calculus and physics. First off, a normal year of calculus does not include partial differentiation, iterated integrals, and differential equations. If you have never studied those topics, which are usually studied in courses such as Calc 3 and Differential Equations, you will have an extremely hard time following the majority of the topics in this book. It is hilarious that Silbey and Alberty define and tell you what the delta symbol means in the beginning of chapter 2 but already assume you know what partial derivative is in chapter 1 when you are assumed to have a "normal year of calculus". I mean every sophmore in highschool knows that delta means "change in" or final minus initial. This book does not even have a periodic table, which is very perplexing. How can a chemistry text not have a periodic table. The text just has a listing of every element by atomic number, which is very annoying since most people are used to looking at a periodic table. Reading the text almost gives the impression that P Chem should only be understood and studied by an elite few who could actually understand the material. Alberty and Silbey talk way over your head and could explain things in a much simpler fashion like my P Chem professor did. The text bogs you down heavily in theory and in the end concepts are not clearly understood. I would definitely recommend to stay far away from this book and use an engineering text for thermodynamics, since they are much more concise and clear. For quantum mechanics there are many better physics texts out there that explain things simply to an undergraduate.

While Alberty and Silbey is extremely well written, their discussion is overly advanced for an undergraduate Pchem course.... While the text provides a lot of good info, the writing style is very high-level and unmotivating, I often got very sleepy while reading the book (especially the chapters
on quantum mechanics). A good text supplements the course lectures, and this one *certainly* did not. Also, check out their references sections at the end of each chapter...many of them are from *old* sources! Also, many of the graphs and diagrams in the book were prepared on old, rattletrap software packages. Well, no wonder, in the Preface they say that their book had been written over the last 83 years! Time to ditch this textbook and go for a fresher approach. Atkins' PChem text
is better, I hear...maybe the revised version that came
out in 2000 is better. The one bit of kudos I can give
to this book is that there are some good end-of-chapter
problems.

Alberty and Silbey contains the information needed in order to learn the material, however, the presentation is haphazard and many derivations/explanations are left out. I recommend reading the series of books written by Dan McQuarrie, or another supplement, then going back to alberty and silbey. The exercises at the end of the chapters are very useful, and I recommend getting the solutions manual for step-by-step explanations.

Physical chemistry is a difficult subject to grasp. This book makes an attempt of understanding physical chemistry even more difficult than what it should be. I have used other professors texts, some over 40 years old, and they make far more sense in explaining the significance of various topics such as the derivation of the Schrodinger equation and its significance. The class that I am enrolled in requires this book, but I instead read another because of its almost impossible comprehension.

As far as I know, there is no good p-chem text around, especially for this generation of students. The various editions of this text has been around for 80 years and it had helped several generations of students to learn p-chem. Not anymore. Very few students of this generation can handle it unless he/she has a very solid math, physics, and chemistry background, can read books written in formal english, and is serious about his/her study. I personally know math majors who are about to graduate with good grades who even have hard time with simple algebra. In conclusion, this book is not very helpful to most today's students. The text by Atkins is a little easier to read. But I'm not sure if today's students will find it much better than this one.

I must disagree with the other reviewer. I do not think that the explanations are clear. The examples could be more illuminating. I have found that other undergrad texts do a better job at presenting the information and would recommend those over Alberty's any day.