General Chemistry

I ordered a book, and never received it. This company refused to send me another one or reimburse my money. And still to this day no book no money. I am out 90 some dollars for a book never received. All i wanted was a contact number, they could not even provide me with that. All i want is my money back. This is really bad business.

In first semester course general chemistry (I am studying biology)it is a quite good to excellent book for reviewing all the general chemistry stuff you need. But the math standard in the book doesn't match with the German math standard at German Universities. Most math examples are very confusing and don't make sense to me. I always calculate those differently. So I use mathematical exercises from other european or german text books. But in my eyes it is a very good book to read, and learn all the basics in chemistry.

As a physical science major, I consider the book to be worst than mediocre. It is way too "general", basically giving worded explanations rather than applied concepts and clear diagrams. Some of the topics are very vague and you are left more confused than ever. I supplement my studying with a McMurray and Fay textbook which is 10 years old and I acquired for 25 cents, and it is even better than this trash of a book. It also provides very few problems at the end of the chapter. For example, for the nomenclature and orbital diagrams, there are only two problems each, not enough to practice for a test. The cummulative skill problems are way to difficult for a beginning scientist, and their level of difficulty isn't justified, since the book doesn't explain clearly. Reading it is basically like reading Popular Science: way too much writing to explain one simple concept. It goes on and on, which makes me think, "Who cares?." If it had not been for the fact that I took introductory chemistry, (I used a Zumdahl book, by the way) I would had been lost. The material is also spread all over the place throughout the chapters. While redox chemistry is introduced somewhere around chapter 7 or eight, you see it again in chapters 20, so my teacher goes back and forth, flipping through the pages. As a relief, the chemistry dept. at my school is changing the book next semester for the general chemistry 2 course. We will be using a Raymond Chang book. Please, professors, do not torture your students by making them buy this book.

This was the assigned text for my first semester of college chemistry. During that one semester, I forced myself to read it without compromise, repulsive though it was.

In general, it seems that the author attempts to make up for their poor writing ability by using small examples of limited applicability to convey general ideas. This method should work well enough to prepare the reader for the relatively easy exercises that they will find at the end of each chapter, but it ultimately fails to prepare them for real-world problems.

Now I have heard that some students prefer examples to words, in which case they should look at this book. Yet for those of us who hope to fully understand the material after the exams are over, a more advanced book is necessary.

This is a text that is relatively low level among those for science majors. It is generally clearly written. If you find questions on your test consistantly harder than the ones in this text, you might have to find used copies of other "harder" textbooks (Zumdahl, Brown/LeMay/Bursten, or Oxtoby) and work some of the more challenging end-of-chapter problems. On the other hand, if you can understand the concepts and follow the explanations in the text, you will have to buy a copy of The Complete Idiot's Guide to Chemistry or Chemistry for Dummies.