BOOK AND MEDIA REVIEW pubs.acs.org/jchemeduc
Review of Advanced Structural Inorganic Chemistry Peter M. Smith* Department of Chemistry, Westminster College, New Wilmington, Pennsylvania 16172, United States
’ AUTHOR INFORMATION
Advanced Structural Inorganic Chemistry by Wai-Kee Li, Gong-Du Zhou, and Thomas Chung Wai Mak. Oxford University Press: New York, 2008. 819 pp. ISBN 9780199216956 (paper). $75.
Corresponding Author
*E-mail:
[email protected].
A
fter reading the preface of this text, I had doubts about the usefulness of this book. My skepticism arose from the fact that the book is an English version of a previously published Chinese textbook. I was expecting just a translation that would likely be full of grammatical errors and that would be difficult to read. I could not have been more wrong. Advanced Structural Inorganic Chemistry is the best text on structural inorganic chemistry that I have seen. It is logically laid out, easy to read and follow, and comprehensive. What a pleasant surprise! The book is divided into three sections: Part I, Fundamentals of Bonding Theory; Part II, Symmetry in Chemistry; and Part III, Structural Chemistry of Selected Elements. Parts I and II contain five chapters each and Part III contains 10 chapters. As the inorganic chemistry professor at a small liberal arts college, it was the first two parts that interested me the most. I believe that the author’s treatment of the material is superb. It is heavily mathematical, but I did not find myself getting bogged down in the equations. I appreciate the thoroughness with which the authors develop the concepts of bonding in molecules and solids, and the application of symmetry and group theory to molecules and crystals. Part III has excellent, current examples of the structural motifs exhibited by the majority of the elements. The book is thoroughly referenced and contains many useful data tables and graphs. I highly recommend this book for graduate level solidstate structure courses. The breadth and depth of the material is unparalleled. However, I would hesitate using this text at an undergraduate level. It is rigorously mathematical and even the best undergraduate students may struggle to find the relevant information. This text would be difficult to use for a standard advanced inorganic chemistry course. It contains bonding and symmetry material, but there is no information about spectroscopy or reactivity. More critically, there are no end-of-chapter problems. I routinely assign these types of problems, and the lack of them makes it difficult to require this text for my courses. However, let me reiterate: this is an excellent graduate-level text and should be adopted by anyone teaching structural inorganic chemistry. Finally, with a $75 list price, this book should be on every inorganic chemistry professor’s bookshelf. It is an amazing reference source and for that alone, I thank the authors. Copyright r 2011 American Chemical Society and Division of Chemical Education, Inc.
Published: June 13, 2011 1033
dx.doi.org/10.1021/ed2001973 | J. Chem. Educ. 2011, 88, 1033–1033
