Physical Chemistry: A Molecular Approach Hardcover – August 20, 1997

I did a lot of reading from this textbook during my year of undergraduate physical chemistry and yes, I know physical chemistry can be frustrating, dry, and mathematically rigorous but i feel it is also immensely rewarding, even though I did not choose chemistry as my career. In my opinion, McQuarrie and Simon do an excellent job of incorporating the math with the chemistry. The book teaches the math right before the chemistry rather than assuming you learned it somewhere else. Also, the chapters and series of chapters are very self-contained, which meant there was no problem with the fact that my class did not follow the book's ordering of chapters. I really agreed with the choices the book made on how to teach thermodynamics and quantum. The book takes a statistical mechanics approach throughout, which I feel is easier than learning classical thermodynamics then introducing microstates/macrostates and stat. mech, even if the latter represents the the historical development of the topic. Personally, I believe quantum chemistry is the highlight of the book and is very well written. Similarly to thermodynamics, I agree with the differential equations approach to intro quantum mechanics rather than matrix algebra. Also, I really enjoyed the chapter-beginning bios highlighting a prominent physicist or chemist. To end my review, I feel the practice questions after each chapter are fairly involved, but appropriate to the difficulty level of an advanced undergrad class.

I am a sterilization microbiologist with my education in medical microbiology. I have found it necessary over the many years I've been out of university to keep abreast and refreshed in the various contributing sciences to my field. Physical Chemistry was the Holy Terror of graduate school (and with good reason). If you weren't a whiz kid in calculas, physics, and chemistry, you had many many many long nights ahead of you. McQuarrie has taken an approach in this text that mitigates much of the terror. His approach is more of a teacher and less of a demi-god trying to impress you with how little you know and how much he knows. His approach is straight-forward and he provides ample use of review of basic principles in calculus, physics, math, etc. after each chapter. This helps in that you don't need to go hunting through old texts to find what you need to understand the concepts in the next chapter. While a massive text, it is worth every penny. This book is very well suited for anyone trying to refresh their knowledge, especially if you're studying by youself. Buy the book. You won't be disappointed.

At first, this book - judging from its thickness - scared me. I owned 3 different 3 P-Chem books prior to this. They were dry, hard to comprehend and worst, they had a lot of typos. So when I saw this text by McQuarrie, I thought that it'd be one of those books that i had to buy for class.After reading the first chapter, I could tell that this text was worth buying. Not only that it gives me the essential mathematical skills to approach p-chem, but it also informs me the applications of p-chem in both chemistry and biology. Best of all, it has the least 'typos' in comparison to other text.The only drawback about this book is the paper. It's very thin - and i understand why. If it were printed in a regular paper, this book would have been twice as thick.This text is the standard text at UC Berkeley.

Fifty years after taking Quantum mechanics in Physics, I wanted an up to date review of what has happened in my lifetime at a high technical level. Mathematically they do not go all the way into the method Froebenius to solve the various Sturm-Liouville equations, but then it is not a course in special functions, but rather their applications to P Chem. I found it especially fascinating that the molecular bonding is a purely quantum mechanical effect involving the exchange integrals of the wave functions. Good read with lots of material. Maybe I can at last understand group theory or at least what it's good for. Solid pedagogical approach, often showing how simplistic examples lead to a subtle understanding. Excellent book. I like the biographical sketches of the famous chemists. Every section title is a full sentence.

I didn’t take a class in physical chemistry, I read though some books on related topics and did some research that integrated concepts from the discipline. This book is beautifully made and well written in a style that draws the reader in. It covers a broad range of physical chemistry concepts in a clear and logical way.

Was not a hardcover book only softcover. Quality is great it’s brand new but this is not what I paid for.

This is a dense textbook that really goes through everything you need to know for a quantum mechanics AND thermodynamics course. It's a little dated in its language but if you've gone this far in Chemistry, you'll have no problems understanding it. No frills though. The figures, graphs, and charts are not in color if that matters to you.