Physical Chemistry

Rating:
Summary: KISS ! (Keep it simple stupid)
Review: 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:
Summary: a horrible text
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent supplement for serious treatments of physical chem
Review: This is an excellent text for serious and independent students of physical chemistry looking for interactive learning experiences. It is not for dabblers, but for the preparation of future practitioners in the field. The book maintains a balance between presenting the material in the text outright and asking the student to participate in his/her own understanding of physical chemical principles by a "discovering by doing" philosophy. If you cannot stand a "fill in the blanks" sort of Socratic method in a book, then this is probably not your cup of tea. But for people who want to thoroughly understand the material on a very detailed level, this is one of the best teaching techniques around. Having taken the course offered by Silbey and used this text for that undergraduate physical chemistry course, I can say that no other method serves the student as well in giving the student an opportunity for an intuitive understanding of the material. If you are serious about understanding this material beyond throwing down the equations and crunching the math, it will be well worth taking Silbey and Alberty's lead on this strong introduction and journey through PChem.