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Title: Physical Chemistry by Robert J. Silbey, Robert A. Alberty ISBN: 0-471-38311-2 Publisher: Wiley Text Books Pub. Date: 06 July, 2000 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $118.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 2 (16 reviews)
Rating: 2
Summary: Too advanced a treatment for undergrads
Comment: While Alberty and Silbey is extremely well written, their discussion is overly advanced for an undergraduate Pchem course.... While the text provides a lot of good info, the writing style is very high-level and unmotivating, I often got very sleepy while reading the book (especially the chapters
on quantum mechanics). A good text supplements the course lectures, and this one *certainly* did not. Also, check out their references sections at the end of each chapter...many of them are from *old* sources! Also, many of the graphs and diagrams in the book were prepared on old, rattletrap software packages. Well, no wonder, in the Preface they say that their book had been written over the last 83 years! Time to ditch this textbook and go for a fresher approach. Atkins' PChem text
is better, I hear...maybe the revised version that came
out in 2000 is better. The one bit of kudos I can give
to this book is that there are some good end-of-chapter
problems.
Rating: 1
Summary: KISS ! (Keep it simple stupid)
Comment: An absolutely atrocious textbook. The preface states that "The objective of this book is to make the concepts and methods of physical chemistry clear and interesting to stdents who have had a year of calculus and a year of physics." What an outrageous lie. No student who takes a normal year of calculus is introduced to multivariable calculus, vector calculus, partial differentiation, linear operators, linear algebra, group theory, legendre transforms,differential equations, and the list goes on. You will have a very hard time understanding this text if you have never had courses in those topics. I'm sure Silbey and Alberty are brilliant, since they are professors at MIT, but they can not write a clear and concise book on physical chemistry. As someone stated earlier, terms are rarely defined, there is no index in the back, and there are errors in the text (email me if you would like to know some). The only thing this textbook has done for me, as well as the rest of the class (yes, I've asked them), is turn us off to the field of physical chemistry. A text should not make an entire class hate the subject, but it should create interest in the subject matter. Silbey and Alberty are masters at obfuscating the concepts of each chapter, trying to understand this text is like trying to understand what Alan Greenspan says, an impossible task. This is a book to pass on, there are other texts on the market that keep things simple and understandable for an INTRODUCTORY physical chemistry course.
Rating: 1
Summary: a horrible text
Comment: I am a fourth year undergrad taking physical chemistry, and this book (Silbey and Alberty) was the required text. I am a science major and this book is one of the worst I have ever used. This book would be a great learning experience if I had enough time for it. It is definitely not designed for a quick study; it has no boxed important equations or summaries of rules which most other physics and math books I have used contain. Thus it requires intensive reading, just to understand the basics of the concepts provided. The problem with this is that more complicated ideas are also presented within the basics; so that what is given is a hodge podge of ideas. Unless you have an excellent lecturer and well defined physical chemistry course at your university, this book is a pain; and it makes learning physical chemistry much harder than a clear and concise book would. It is extremely convoluted.
My suggestion to people who are taking physical chemistry and for which this book is required: to plan ahead and set a lot of time aside just for reading this book; or getting another book to supplement it.
Also another annoying problem: a lot of the solutions in the solution manual are horrible, either they give wrong answers or they do not give thorough explanations. Often times I spend more time trying to figure out what the solution manual is doing than solving the problems.
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Title: Solutions Manual to Accompany Physical Chemistry by Robert A. Alberty, John Wiley & Sons ISBN: 0471160288 Publisher: John Wiley & Sons Pub. Date: 06 August, 1996 List Price(USD): $37.95 |
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Title: Applied Mathematics for Physical Chemistry (2nd Edition) by James R. Barrante ISBN: 0137417373 Publisher: Prentice Hall Pub. Date: 11 August, 1997 List Price(USD): $27.00 |
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Title: Basic Chemical Thermodynamics (Oxford Chemistry Series) by E. Brian Smith ISBN: 0198555644 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: November, 1990 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
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Title: Principles of Instrumental Analysis by Douglas A. Skoog, F. James Holler, Timothy A. Nieman ISBN: 0030020786 Publisher: Brooks Cole Pub. Date: 03 September, 1997 List Price(USD): $140.95 |
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Title: Analysis, Synthesis, and Design of Chemical Processes, Second Edition by Richard Turton, Richard C. Bailie, Wallace B. Whiting, Joseph A. Shaeiwitz ISBN: 0130647926 Publisher: Prentice Hall PTR Pub. Date: 22 October, 2002 List Price(USD): $115.00 |
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