General Chemistry,   ISBN:9780486656229

Customer Rating: 

I started my serious education in chemistry from this book. I was very young then. This book, which was later supported by other more specialistic books in chemistry and physics made me to choose chemistry as my specialisation.

Really great introduction to the chemistry for young people with a passion!

Highly recommended!

Customer Rating: 

Rooted in both vigor and simplicity, this chemistry text will amaze you. Pauling is very mindful of how the student ought to recieve information and in that he carefully picks the order of topics. Too often people disreguard the importance of the presentation of information. It's a shame because they are being willfully ignorant to techniques that catalyze and promote learning. Our brains are more responsive to associative learning because biologically that's what goes on in neural circuitry. Anyways, it's best I don't spur off into a tangent. Buy this book. It taught me chemistry.

Customer Rating: 

Nothing to say about this well known book as a hi level introduction to general chemistry.
What it's amazing is to buy such new book at such price !

Customer Rating: 

This book will never look old. It’s still much more clear than many (college) chemistry books. In my opinion this volume should be suggested as a reference for a general chemistry college course.

Customer Rating: 

This is an interesting, if somewhat dated and eccentric textbook by the man who was probably the leading chemist of the twentieth century. It is full of interesting insight, and written with real flair, so much unlike the typical textbook today produced by the textbook publishing machines.

Let me give a couple of examples, good and bad, of what makes this book interesting, but also exasperating.

The book is the only freshman chemistry text I know of that has a derivation of the Boltzmann distribution P ~ e^(-E/kT), a very basic relation in the kinetic theory of gases and in fact in all of statistical physics. The derivation is simpler than most, which makes it a real jewel especially at this level, where most people would think it doesn't belong.

On the other hand, the section on chemical bonding, which is actually where Pauling made his reputation, is very eccentric, like the author, so much so that it makes the book unsuitable as the sole text for a course. It is all based on sp3 hybrid orbitals. As far as I can tell, sp2 and sp hybrids are never mentioned. With the sp3 story, Pauling is able to account surprisingly well for some systematics of bond lengths. Whether this is fortuitous or not, I don't know, but it is interesting. On the other hand, without sp2 and sp hybrids, he is completely unable to give the standard, very simple, beautiful account of bond angles. A student learning introductory chemistry from this text who then went into organic chemistry would soon be at a disadvantage without knowing the theory of hybrid orbitals that everyone else would get from any of the standard contemporary texts.

My recommendation: use this text as a very insightful, quirky supplement. The price is certainly right.

The text that comes closest, in my opinion, in seriousness, if not eccentricity, is the contemporary text by Oxtoby and coauthors. It is too highbrow though for most college introductory chemistry courses.