Review: A Decent Introductory Chemistry Textbook
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 11 14, 2010
Chemistry is one of the fundamental scientific disciplines, and it is considered one of the physical sciences. It is also one of the scientific disciplines with a great amount of new research, and hardly a year passes without some new profound discovery being made. Sometimes even the experts are hard to keep up with all of the recent developments, and although most of the material in a standard chemistry course is already well established, there are enough of the new and exciting discoveries every year to justify new editions of chemistry textbooks. Unfortunately, the prices of new textbooks have been steadily increasing over the years, so it is incredibly refreshing to come across a well-organized free textbook that can be used in introductory chemistry classes.This is by and large a very approachable and well presented introductory chemistry textbook. It is written with an advanced high school student or beginning college student in mind. Topics covered include chemistry as a physical science, the atomic theory, quantum mechanics model of the atom, electron configurations for atoms, periodic table, ions and compounds, covalent bonding, chemical reactions, states of matter, acids and basis, pH factor, thermodynamics, organic chemistry, and many others.Each chapter ends with a several questions, many of which are quantitative. The textbook stresses critical and scientific thinking as well as the quantitative skills. It  is a very interesting and well organized textbook and provides an excellent introduction to chemistry. In addition to questions, there are also numerous vocabulary terms listed at the end of each chapter. These provide the student with an opportunity to systematize the knowledge gained in the preceding chapter. There are also numerous references for further study and links to other outside resources.The book is replete with many illustrations, but most of them are not very advanced or detailed. They are definitely of inferior quality to most other CK-12 textbooks.This book is available under the Creative Commons License through the CK-12 foundation, which means it can be reprinted, modified and resold if necessary. It is also a fairly large file, the pdf version being over 1200 pages long, so be prepared for a long download time.The Kindle formatting of this textbook leaves something to be desired. The book was originally typeset in LaTeX, and this did not translate all that smoothly into the Kindle format. I've found that getting this textbook on other e-readers or computers in the epub format rendered it much more satisfactorily.This is not the flashiest textbook that you will come across, but in my opinion it gets the job done.