Chemical Education Today
Exploring Chemical Analysis, 1st Edition Daniel C. Harris. W. H. Freeman: New York, 1997. ISBN: 0 7167 3042 1. $80.00.
Daniel Harris’s book Quantitative Chemical Analysis is one of the 1000-pound gorillas for introductory analytical chemistry, both because of its dominance in the field and its size and information content. Students find the writing informal, interesting, and clear. Faculty like the completeness of the book and its sound treatment of the subject matter. It contains everything that an introductory analytical course could possibly want. Daniel Harris’s recent book, Exploring Chemical Analysis, is a tamed version of the 1000-pound gorilla for nonchemistry majors. Students will find the same informality, interest, and clarity as in the earlier text but they will also find the book a comfortable companion. Faculty will find an abbreviated but excellent treatment of the subject matter. It contains most of the things that an introductory nonmajors analytical course should want. Harris has set clear priorities in developing this book. He has focused clearly on the most important fundamentals and topics in the nonmajors course. He has extensively pruned the less important material but left the important material, such as acid–base chemistry, largely untouched. He has eliminated the general treatments, diving directly into specific topics. Ideas that were foreshadowed in earlier sections and repeated subsequently are now treated only once. The book is somewhat more qualitative and uses pictures more efficiently. Practical tips and experimental details are sacrificed when they do not relate directly to principles or common laboratory experiences. Despite the extensive changes, the book remains well integrated and coherent. Faculty will find many of their favorite innovations in the previous text unchanged. The book continues to make extensive and effective use of margin notes, summaries, tips, connections to forgotten mathematics, demonstrations, worked examples, examples from the research literature and
current topics, spreadsheets, concept questions, and interesting problems that blend easily with the main text flow. In addition to the regular problems, each chapter has simple problems that the students work as they read the material so they can better master the ideas. Complete solutions to these problems are in the back of the book. And then of course, there are the topics that are left out. Although each individual will have favorite casualties, I mourned the loss of a quantitative treatment of chelation equilibria and oxidation–reduction titrations. Chelation loses its separate chapter and now shares a qualitative chapter with iodine titrations. It is used to discuss the different titration strategies such as back-titrations, masking, displacement titrations, and indirect titrations. Although the earlier book did have a brief discussion of thermodynamic concepts, any mention of thermodynamics has been eliminated in this text. To compensate, Harris has added some very nice examples. The current text has a number of fresh examples of analytical applications in environmental and biological areas. The analytical chemistry of fish tanks has also been added. There are a number of new experiments that provide excellent illustrations of the environmental and biological applications. There are even initial attempts to relate the analytical chemistry to organic chemistry. Exploring Chemical Analysis is likely to find a receptive audience. Because of the severe pruning, the text is much more focused and manageable by students who may have discomfort with chemistry. Harris does an excellent job of making the subject matter clear, concise, and interesting without removing much of the important chemistry. I would strongly recommend this textbook for an introductory nonmajors analytical chemistry course. John Wright Department of Chemistry University of Wisconsin–Madison 1101 University Avenue Madison, WI 53706
JChemEd.chem.wisc.edu • Vol. 75 No. 1 January 1998 • Journal of Chemical Education
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