Principles of Modern Chemistry

Rating:
Summary: excellent
Review: I have read the other reviews, but I think this is an excellent text for general chemistry (or introductory courses). The fundamentals are well-explained, and the core itself is easily comprehensible and detailed... a wonderful read.

Rating:
Summary: Pretty Good
Review: I never actually used this book; I TAed for a class that used it. I ended up reading alot of it and thought that it was pretty good, but didn't cover all the math and derivations that were used in the course. Its a good book for basic general chemistry, but it does not explain the math very well. I also wouldn't reccommend it for students who have never taken chemistry at all because its probably too advanced. Take home message: its a more advanced general chem book, but fails miserably in explaining the math.

Rating:
Summary: A better choice
Review: In contrast to textbooks that spend an enormous ammount of paper on outlining the very principles vaguely, this book gets to the point. It is a much better choice that for instance Munowitz's "Principles of Chemistry" as it is better illustrated and gives betterexplained examples. It has some weaknesses, but it is a real Chemistry book, that might prove useful doing chemical problems. For a really interested person it is not a bad choice.

Rating:
Summary: principles in qmodern chemistry
Review: not a good book for those who want to understand a lo

Rating:
Summary: A good text
Review: Oxtoby and Nachtrieb 3e is a great text. It has wonderful and helpful illustrations to highlight key concepts in the text, without being overdone or overly clutterd. The quantum mechanics sections are great for an intro course in chemistry.

Rating:
Summary: Useful, if not on a quantum basis
Review: Principles of Modern Chemistry's strength is that it is well illustrated with very useful graphs, and provided a good overview of basic chemistry throughout most of its contents. The narrative generally followed logically and clearly, if not always in-depth enough. However, when it came to quantum mechanics, the explanations were quite lacking and the structure was rather muddled. Around chapter 15, the book really ceased to be satisfactory, and it would be more efficient to simply skim the illustrations.

Rating:
Summary: chem major from S. Hadley, MA
Review: This book does a decent job of outlining the 'principles', but fails to draw concepts together in a way that would make the subject more understandable to beginning chemistry students.

Rating:
Summary: good, but other options are available
Review: This book does a good job of going over the fundamentals, but the student study guide that accompanies the text does a much better job of actually explaining how to work chemistry problems.

Rating:
Summary: Great chemistry textbook for college freshmen
Review: Though many people would find this book distasteful, it is an extremely good source of information for both basic and intermediate chemistry. It is obviously not a book any student can handle, but with a good background in basic chemistry, the book will take the student a long way down the path of chemistry. The book uses colorful pictures and graphs to show the reader what the chemistry looks like in real life rather than just teaching the bare concept.

Chemistry is not about doing word problems; it is about actually seeing the results and learning to analyze these results. If you prefer to just get through chemistry and "learn" how to do problems without learning the real applications, choose another book. If you actually want to learn chemistry, this is the perfect book for you. As opposed to the average textbook that drags a subject matter on, this book is very concise and moves on after showing a derivation of an equation or one sample problem. Obviously this book may seem hard and seemingly impossible to comprehend at times, but a good recommendation is to get enough sleep before reading the book because it is much denser than other introduction to chemistry textbooks.