Prentice Hall Chemistry The book was in great condition and arrived more quickly than I expected. Unfortunately, the school would not allow student use of the teachers edition so I ended up having to purchase the student version.
My highschool textbook This book is a good study aid if you have a good instructor. However, depending on this book to teach you chemistry may become a little confusing (as my high school teacher is currently doing). I noticed that it's not very straightforward. Say you were learning about radiation - the types of radiation and how decay occurs. The text itself won't tell you exactly how the mass or atomic number changes after a certain radioactive decay. Rather, it provides you with assessment questions at the end of each section with direct questions about number changes, making it so that you would have to figure out from the extensive number of examples what the answer is. This textbook's method of teaching is making the reader infer, which is great for literature, but certainly not for textbooks. I recommend something that is more concise and straightforward: The Complete Idiot's Guide to Chemistry, 2nd Edition (Complete Idiot's Guide to). What takes 3 pages to explain in the textbook is explained in 3 paragraphs in this guide.
Great Buy I'm usually concerned about purchasing items on line, especially books. I can honestly say that this experience was worth it. I would recommend this seller to anyone interested in purchasing good quality books at extremely reasonable prices.
Buy with confidence, I did!
Terrible introductory text Good thing my teacher was so good because this book is terrible.
The explanations are lacking in important areas and overdone in others. It spends like 2 pages on VSEPR theory, incomplete activity series and solubility rules, and terrible intro in stoichiometry. We only did 15 chapters, but this book didn't help at all. I didn't even read half of it because the problems offer no challenge whatsoever. Not enough application problems. The end of section review Qs only ask for definitions and explanations, no real chemistry. No difficult and tricky questions whatsoever.
Honestly, no clue why high schools use this text so much. Pretty sad if this is the best there is.
An overall Disappointment This book was largely a disappointment. I had heard previously that this was the leading high school text that is used and had high expectations. I was disappointed to find a plethora of type errors (including math mistakes!) and also very poor descriptions of things like bonding theory, equilibrium constants, reaction rates etc. The book covers a lot but fails to get real advanced in much of anything. I would reccomend for the advanced high school student a college level text with a good teacher instead of wasting your time on this.
Anything Goes Trivia
Megaton Man
Trevor
