Chemistry: Principles and Reactions 8th Edition

Book Preface

It is always difficult for an author to praise the virtues of one’s own book. I couldtell the instructors that the book is so inspiring that students will be turned on to chemistry with little or no effort on the instructor’s part. I doubt you would believe that. I could also tell you that the text is so clearly written, so attuned to the students in the twenty-first century that your students will learn chemistry with little or no effort on their part. You certainly would not believe that. I can tell you that the two goals in writing this edition have been to make it as clear and as interesting as possible. I hope you believe that, because it is true.

Today’s freshmen are quite different from those of a few years ago. Text messaging and TwitterTM have strongly influenced sentence length and structure. In current writing and conversation, short sentences or sentence fragments convey straight to-the-point information. Multimedia presentations are a way of life. This edition, like the seventh, is written to be fully in tune with today’s technology and speech.

Why Write a Short Book?

Rising tuition costs, depleted forests, and students’ aching backs have kept me steadfast in my belief that it should be possible to cover a text completely (or at least almost completely) in a two-semester course. The students (and their parents) justifiably do not want to pay for 1000-page books with material that is never discussed in the courses taught with those texts.

The common perception is that a short book is a low-level book. I believe, however, that treating general concepts in a concise way can be done without sacrificing depth, rigor, or clarity. The criterion for including material continues to be its importance and relevance to the student, not its difficulty. To achieve this, the following guidelines are used.

1. Eliminate repetition and duplication wherever possible. Like its earlier editions, this text uses

â– â– Only one method for balancing redox reactions, the half-equation method introduced in Chapter 17.
â– â– Only one way of working gas-law problems, using the ideal gas law in all cases (Chapter 5).
■■Only one way of calculating ΔH (Chapter 8), using enthalpies of formation.
â– â– Only one equilibrium constant for gas-phase reactions (Chapter 12), the thermodynamic constant K, often referred to as Kp. This simplifies not only the treatment of gaseous equilibrium but also the discussion of reaction spontaneity (Chapter 16) and electrochemistry (Chapter 17).

2. Relegate to the Appendices or Beyond the Classroom essays topics ordinarily covered in longer texts. Items in this category include

â– â– MO (molecular orbital) theory (Appendix 4). Experience has shown (and continues to show) that although this approach is important to chemical bonding, most general chemistry students do not understand it but only memorize the principles discussed in the classroom.
â– â– Nomenclature of organic compounds. This material is of little value in a beginning course and is better left to a course in organic chemistry.
â– â– Qualitative analysis. This is summarized in a few pages in an essay in Chapter 15 in the Beyond the Classroom section. An extended discussion of the qualitative scheme and the chemistry behind it belongs in a laboratory manual, not a textbook.
â– â–  Biochemistry. This material is traditionally covered in the last chapter of
general chemistry texts. Although there are several biochemical topics included in the text (among them a discussion of heme in Chapter 19 and carotenoids in Chapter 6), an entire chapter is not devoted to biochemistry. Interesting as this material is, it requires a background in organic chemistry that first-year students lack.

3. Avoid superfluous asides, applications to the real world, or stories about scientists in the exposition of principles. There are many applications incorporated in the context of problems and some of the exposition of general principles. In general, however, a bare-bones approach is used. Students can easily be distracted by interesting but peripheral tidbits while they are striving hard to understand the core concepts. Favorite real-world applications and personal stories about scientists are in separate sections, Beyond the Classroom and Chemistry: The Human Side. Students say that they read these two sections first and that these are the parts of the book that “we really enjoy the most.” (Talk about faint praise!) They do admit to enjoying the marginal notes too.