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Rating: 
Summary: Buy another book
Review: I hate this book! The lack of examples and clear explanation is immensely frustrating. Compared to Daniel Harris' analytical chemistry textbook, this book is even worse. I highly advocate finding another book with more examples and thorough explanation.
Rating:
Summary: Bad, bad, mean, bad ugly book!
Review: This book is terrible for many reasons. First it tries to teach electronics and does not provide any easy to follow logic that leads to understanding. I'm more confused now than before the semester started! Second, there are errors, errors and more errors. Typos, diagram mistakes, use of acronyms that are defined later in the chapters. One instance left me wondering and rereading for an hour trying to figure out what the hell is the point of formal potential of 0.65 V versus NHE when I had no clue what NHE meant or how it was relevant. I thought I had completely missed something and I finally decided to skip it and found NHE defined 5 pages later. This book will confuse students, please do not teach from if you are a prof. Now I'm stuck on three-electrode potentiostat and I know there is something wrong in the text so what is my next logical step? I search the web for a listing of errata hoping someone (maybe the authors) proof read their work and put up corrects. No of course I haven't found anything yet so here I am trashing the book. I can only hope for a miracle to pass this course final next week.
Rating:
Summary: Not the worst book ever...but close!
Review: Upon first skimming through this book, I liked the easy readability of the text and I liked the variety and scope of topics listed in the table of contents. However, having used this book for a semester-long, upper level undergraduate chemistry course, I wish I had chosen another text.This book is organized in a strange way that is very difficult for students to learn from. The separate "Introduction to..." chapters (for spectrometry and separations) did not help my students understand the material in subsequent chapters. Some material was seemingly inserted in random locations within a chapter, while other material (of equal or greater importance) was relegated to the end of the chapter in sections titled "A Deeper Look." Some information, such as a description of different types of electronic transitions, was not to be found anywhere. Some chapters are extremely long (e.g. the Introduction to Spectrometry chapter is almost 90 pages) while others are amazingly short (IR and Raman together take up less than 40 pages). Since there is no logical organization, it is difficult to divide the longer chapters into assignment-sized chunks. The students complained that the text did not make sense and that it was poorly written. There are hardly any worked example problems in the text and the end-of-chapter problems are often so confusing that we could not figure out what was being asked. In addition, there appeared to be many errors (typographical and calculational) in both the problem statements and the solutions at the back of the book. We even found that different printings sometimes gave different answers for a given problem. The rest of the text is also riddled with errors. The definitions of elastic and inelastic collisions are given on one page and then reversed on the following page. The word "spectrometry" is misspelled in the Brief Contents. After five weeks of this, I started giving extra credit to students for reporting errors. I wanted to give this book a chance. I wanted something that would challenge the class. But the book has only succeeded in frustrating everyone. For the price paid for this book, it is a crime not to have something worthwhile. Don't buy this book for any reason. If I could give it zero stars, I would.
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