Conor Lyons's Blog

The undergraduate chemistry student will find about five titles to choose…

The undergraduate chemistry student will find about five titles to choose from in each branch: these books, bought upon starting a BSc course, will serve the student throughout his or her three years. So what is on offer and what should we expect from these weighty tomes?
The model textbook should have 8001200 pages divided into 2030 chapters covering the major topic areas.
Each chapter should have references to keynote original papers, and to books covering the subject in greater depth.
To help the reader test his or her understanding there should be several problems at the end of chapters, and worked examples in the text where a general law or difficult point is discussed. Units should be SI.
Good quality artwork ” figures, graphs, formulae, diagrams etc ” is very important in the teaching of chemistry and a comprehensive index essential. How do current textbooks meet this ideal?
In inorganic chemistry, F. Albert Cotton and Geoffrey Wilkinson’s Advanced Inorganic Chemistry (Wiley) has dominated the market for 20 years.
First published in 1962 and now in its 4th edition (1980) and this fulfils a role as a reference text rather better than a student text, in that it has hundreds of references but no problems.
Unlike other inorganic texts it is based on the periodic table, although 500 of its 1365 pages are on introductory or special topics and such as organometallics, cluster and bio-inorganic chemistry, which have developed in recent years.
Despite its heavy style and dull format, it remains the best inorganic book and will serve its owner beyond the BSc stage. What of the competition?
Keith Purcell and John Kotz’s Inorganic Chemistry (Saunders) appeared in 1980 and approached the subject via inorganic concepts.
Much better illustrated than Cotton and Wilkinson and with problems, it is a better teaching aid, but it over-emphasises bonding theory in a rather daunting way. More recently Therald Moeller’s Inorganic Chemistry “(Wiley) has appeared.
This author’s 1952 work on the subject was a masterpiece: half the book devoted to concepts, half to the chemistry of the elements. The present book is only concepts.
Unfortunately, like Purcell and Kotz, he has kept to the old non-SI units. He has also retained a lot of the old emphasis.
In some respects this is good when it means such topics as non-aqueous solvents are covered, but bad when the reader searches this chapter in vain for information about new solvents. Some diagrams are poorly reproduced and tables printed vertically. Even so the book has a lot to offer and is packed with useful data.

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