Product Description

Known for helping students develop the qualitative, conceptual foundation that gets them thinking like chemists, this market-leading text is designed for students with solid mathematical preparation and prior exposure to chemistry. The unique organization of the text supports this qualitative-to-quantitative approach. A strong emphasis on models and everyday applications of chemistry combines with a thoughtful, step-by-step problem solving approach to build conceptual understanding.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #17787 in Books
• Published on: 2007-12-03
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 1200 pages

Review
"The greatest strength is the level at which the material is presented. It is intellectually challenging and a book useful to all levels of interest. In addition the book also takes time to show clearly and slowly how to do various problems for students with minimal backgrounds in chemistry." -- Review

Review
The writing style is lucid, direct, precise, and non-verbose. Some other introductory chemistry texts adopt a verbose presentation with the attendant loss of clarity.

The writing style is crisp and to the point whereas the art, tables, and end of chapter problems nicely support the written text.

My sense is that the topics are pitched at an appropriate level.

The students who are floundering and to whom I have recommended Zumdahl invariably come away with an enhanced understanding of the relevant chemical concepts after a thorough encounter with this text.

This is the singular text that does not compromise discipline of mind and contains flashes of insight and brilliance reminiscent of the Linus Pauling series of introductory texts, and yet is conceptually and algebraically accessible to most students with a good background in high school chemistry.

About the Author
Steven S. Zumdahl earned a B.S. in Chemistry from Wheaton College (IL) and a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He has been a faculty member at the University of Colorado-Boulder, Parkland College (IL), and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) where he is Professor Emeritus. He has received numerous awards including the National Catalyst Award for Excellence in Chemical Education, the University of Illinois Teaching Award, the UIUC Liberal Arts and Sciences Award for Excellence in Teaching, UIUC Liberal Arts and Sciences Advising Award, and the School of Chemical Sciences Teaching award (five times). He is the author of several chemistry textbooks. In his leisure time he enjoys traveling and collecting classic cars.

Customer Reviews

Maybe good for AP Highschool
This is the book my prof had us use for GenChem (129) my freshmen year of college. The book isn't the best I have seen and if I hadn't had a really rigorous prep in AP Chem I would have been lost in the reading. I didn't think the book was very clear with the formulae. It spent a lot of time explaining how a formula was derived, a student should have an understanding of the reasoning for the formula (or George Berkeley will yell), but this text does not give the formula and what all the variables are at once point. This makes review and looking up formulae rather labourous. The text misses a few important ideas (intensive vs. extensive properties) but spends a rather excessive amount of time on "present sources of energy" in an attempt, I presume, to relate the text to daily life. The data in the back of the book doesn't match up with a good deal of the data I have encountered elsewhere (while the difference isn't huge, it is present). Also, this may be because I came from a background where strict usage of sig figs was required, no points could be awarded if there were mistakes in the sig figs, I have noticed that the text plays rather "loose" with the sig figs. Also, it has comments like "We are keeping track of the sign value for this number in our heads." Furthermore, some of the vocab usage is off from what it should be (i.e. "All values are assumed precise to at least plus/minus 1." is noted on the list of thermodynamic data, it means the data is accurate, how close to the "true" value, and not precise, how close the tests are to one another). These are all minor problems, but proper use of vocab and sig figs are vital to the ability of a student to communcate properly and therefore I feel that the text should provide a model for the student.

Of the GenChem textbooks I have used, I vastly prefer Chemistry : The Central Science by Brown, LeMay and Bursten.

Good and bad
The main strength of the book is its large amount of interesting and largely error-free problems. Unfortunately, some of the more advanced material isn't really well explained. A good example is the book's coverage of particle-in-a-box: it's covered well enough for a beginning student to solve some problems, but without the more thorough follow up you get in a quantum class, you're just pushing symbols. The same goes for many of the other, somewhat more advanced topics in the book - MO theory, gas dynamics, etc.

It may have made pchem and inorganic a little easier, but it made for frustrating reading at the time.

Use 5th edition if you can...
There is very little difference between this edition and the previous one which is normally the case with college textbooks today. It's a mystery to me why colleges use any material by this author. Brooks and Cole should stop publishing him. The Zumdahl methods for teaching chemistry are truly awful. You can find various mistakes in this and previous editions of this text. His derivation regarding the ideal gas law is one example. Why even include it in the text if you can't do it correctly? He obviously does not understand basic Newtonian Physics.