Product Description

The student-friendly style of the book makes the content accessible without sacrificing either breadth or depth of coverage. The text's informal writing style, emphasis on problem solving, and state-of-the-art media package make this book an ideal fit at schools with large class sizes and a wide range of student abilities and backgrounds. The authors' goal was to create a complete package (text + media + supplements) which would challenge the better-prepared students and provide support to the lesser prepared students, giving ALL students a chance to succeed. 4e welcomes a new co-author Fred Senese, Frostburg State University, the creator of the award-winning General Chemistry Online and Ask Antoine (the most hit general chem web resource in the world with over 15 million hits/year). In addition to creating the new Brady/Senese website, he has also worked with Jim Brady to do significant revisions in the text.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #253609 in Books
• Published on: 2004-02-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Textbook Binding
• 1256 pages

Review
Study Guide and Student Solutions Manual available. -- The publisher, John Wiley & Sons

Review
"I feel it would make an excellent addition to any chemistry department's coffee table text."(Education in Chemistry, September 2001)

From the Publisher
Offers accurate, lucid and interesting explanations of basic concepts and facts of chemistry, while helping readers develop skills in analytical thinking and problem solving. Features frequent references to common chemicals and numerous photographs of reactions help to focus and inspire interest. Readers are taught to think of problem-solving skills as tools.

Customer Reviews

excellent text
This textbook is an excellent way to learn chemistry. It provides very nice graphics to explain the text. This text makes learning chemistry very enjoyable and interesting. Senese and Brady did a wonderful job with this book. I highly recommend it.

this text does stand out from the pack...
...in a number of ways. The chapter on stoichiometry is the first one I flip to when I'm evaluating a new text. This book does a better job of providing a conceptual foundation for the mole concept than any other book I've seen. It shows the rationale behind the concept by working a few simple problems with and without moles. The problem setups emphasize strategic thinking by asking students to identify the 'critical link' that connects given information with the problem's goal. The "Is the answer reasonable" checks given with each problem are more detailed and more helpful than in other texts; they help students develop a sense for what is and isn't reasonable in the answer, using alternative back-of-the-envelope solutions that often provide additional insight into the nature of the problem.

The chapter on atomic structure is the only one I've seen that uses the central idea of quantum mechanics (wave-particle duality) as its central theme. It elegantly uses the de Broglie relation to tie wave and particle behaviors together, in the process naturally explaining where quantum numbers come from and why changes in electron confinement in a reaction can lead to color changes.

The thermodynamics chapter is also quite innovative, discarding the idea of entropy as a measure of disorder and instead stressing its connection with the number of ways a state can be realized. A simple model of heat flow from a hot object to a cold object makes the connection between probability and process spontaneity clear.

The approach for explaining and predicting molecular shapes is much better than that used in other texts, where students end up memorizing a large table of molecular shapes. This text starts by showing how electron domains arrange themselves the central atom, and then visualizes how the molecular geometry changes as bonding domains are replaced with nonbonding domains, one at a time. Students see the underlying idea without getting lost in a mass of detail and special cases.

I also like the "Thinking it through" problems at the end of each chapter, that emphasize critical and strategic thinking rather than simply getting a numerical answer. Ebbing and Chang don't have this feature. The "Test of facts and concepts" are cumulative tests that students can use to synthesize material from several chapters; I haven't seen another text with this feature, either.

a chemistry book for all science purposes
THIS BOOK IS A GREAT GUIDE FOR ANY STUDENT WHO WANTS TO LEARN CHEMISTRY AND ALSO A GREAT GUIDE FOR THOSE WHO WANT TO PREPARE3 THEM SELVES FOR WHAT'S AHEAD AT UNIVERSITY.