Customer Reviews

Schaum's Outline of Beginning Chemistry, Third Edition (Schaum's Outline Series)

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Schaum's Outline of Beginning Chemistry is designed for use in high school level chemistry courses, AP chemistry courses and non-majors college chemistry courses. There are 19 chapters, organized topically which cover all the major general chemistry concepts. This book assumes no background in chemistry and a modest background in mathematics through Algebra I. It should nicely complement almost any of the standard general chemistry texts used in high schools and colleges today. This would also be a wise choice for students in nursing programs who are required to take a general chemistry course.

One of the major strengths of Schaum's Beginning Chemistry are the comprehensive yet succinct explanations of concepts. Each chapter opens with definitions and explanations of key terms followed by a series of example problems worked with detailed solutions. Then, an additional 40-50 practice problems are provided in each chapter with complete solutions (most of which are detailed). Successful chemistry students know that "studying" means solving problems. If you spend any more than 20% of your study time reading pages and pages of textual explanations, you aren't studying effectively. I would suggest that students work through these practice problems continually throughout their course and in the weeks leading up to major exams. Some problems are extremely basic and others are quite challenging. There are well over 600 problems to solve in this book!

For students taking university-level chemistry for science majors, I would suggest the alternate version of this text, Schaum's Outline of College Chemistry. College Chemistry assumes some background in the physical sciences and includes more advanced topics, formulas and practice problems.

For students who are looking for a useful reference for the MCAT, I would suggest a different text entirely since the MCAT is a multiple-choice based examination. The practice problems in this book will greatly enhance your understanding of general chemistry topics, but will not make you a better MCAT test-taker. For the MCAT, I suggest Examkrackers MCAT Chemistry which contains multiple choice and passage-based practice problems.

Overall Rating:
"A" for comprehensive, yet concise explanations along with hundreds of practice problems.

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This book was helpful for a honors chemistry class {11th grade}. It made things much clearer. It's been a great addition to the text book. It's simple and to the point...not too complex.

I got this book to review chemistry course, this book is awesome. I can't guarantee that this book has better lectures than any other chemistry text book, but what appealed to me is the amount of exercises it has. If I couldn't really get the lecture, I started doing the exercises and I got it no problem. It saved me some time on rereading over and over and over. And the explanations for the problems are great too.
I got this book at library and I really don't wanna give it back :(

Ordered this book to make chemistry a little easier. It turns out that it is so much more difficult to trudge through than the actual textbook, due to perhaps the layout and lack of adequate charts and illustrations to break up the text