There are two books with the title of “Descriptive Inorganic Chemistry”, both directed at sophomore level intro inorganic chemistry. There’s this 2nd edition by House & House and another book by Rayner-Canham & Overton, currently in its 6th edition.
Both textbooks approach the subject in a less rigorous, less mathematical way using the periodic table to survey the most important elements and their chemistry. Typically used in courses which come before the student has encountered major amounts of advanced, theoretical physical chemistry. Each book has a minimal amount of transition metal and organometallic chemistry.
The Rayner-Canham book covers more material and certainly has more end-of-chapter questions. But overall I like this black & white book by House & House better. The font size and general layout is more readable, the end of chapter annotated references are more relevant, the chapter material is a bit more concise and to-the-point and the problem sets contain fewer questions. That way, the instructor can assign any chapter along with the questions as homework and know that everything’s been covered and the students aren’t overwhelmed with too much work.
The one major shortcoming of House & House is that the early foundational chapters on bonding are much too limited on topics like VSEPR, valence bond theory, covalent/ionic/metallic bonding. Perhaps they intended lecturers to cover that material in class with whatever depth they deemed necessary. (update: Looks like some of these topics have been added to the 3rd edition. But they had to go to a smaller font to add this extra material and still keep the book to a reasonable size; too bad on the smaller font size)
You can now get the 3rd edition of House & House but I like it less due to its full color printing. Too many colors doesn’t help with learning and makes the book look like a gaudy cartoon. And the full color printing needlessly drives up the price.
The only thing I wish about this 2nd edition is that a hardcover edition was available, but it’s not.
For those of you who only want one book that covers most of the undergraduate inorganic chemistry curriculum except organometallics consider Concise Inorganic Chemistry by J.D. Lee, 5th edition (~1000 pages).
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