A Pretty Thorough Book
There are not alot of I-CHEM textbooks out there in the first place, and finding a decent one is even harder. This one, however, ranks among the decent ones. While it's not brand new, the concepts and explanations are applicable to the latest college I-CHEM class. I bought this book as an inexpensive supplement to my other I-CHEM textbook from Housecroft. This book helps to reinforce and explain some of concepts you might get in a book like Housecroft's in a little more depth.
I will say, for those of you who might feel this is important, is that this textbook isn't full of color illustrations and graphs. It's all black and white graphs and print. To most this won't matter, but to some it makes the book too boring to read - so I thought I'd put that info in my review.
Comprehensive, but not complete
This book was used in a class I nearly took in college; while I couldn't fit the course into my schedule, I kept the book.
What the book does, it does well: for example, its coverage of the noble gases is quite extensive. It also does an excellent job covering acid/base chemistry, going into far more detail than any book I had seen to that point (although its approach tended to be descriptive and qualitative rather than quantitative).
That said, there are some significant gaps in the book: for example, while there is a chapter on the halogens and noble gases, there are no corresponding chapters for the other element groups (though that doesn't mean they aren't treated).
The biggest flaw in this book, though, is the woefully inadequate index: there are many, many things that should be listed, but aren't. For example, the book uses a certain type of diagram in three different chapters. Only the second and third instances, though, are listed in the index; the first time, where the diagrams are actually explained, is not listed at all. Similarly, there are very few entries for the elements themselves: there are no entries *at all* for hydrogen, iodine, copper, or calcium, just to name four.
All in all, it's still a very good book, but it's by no means perfect (or the only book of its kind). Large sections of the book are written at a relatively advanced level, so I certainly wouldn't recommend this for someone who hasn't had a significant chemistry background, but I would recommend it for someone trying to build a reference library.
About Inorganic Chemistry: Principles of Structure and Reactivity (4th Edition) detail
- Amazon Sales Rank: #106679 in Books
- Published on: 1997-01-17
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Hardcover
- 964 pages
