chemistry

As an undergrad chemistry major at James Madison University, I was required to purchase this text for my senior level instrumental methods class. Fortunately, my professor was one of the co-authors to a previous edition of this book and was able to point out many of the editing flaws in this text before they became a problem. But any good book has its problems. I found it increasingly frustrating that some of the diagrams were mislabeled, or labeled with information of questionable accuracy and/or value. Additionally, the book is written in an extremely dull fashion. Well, you may be saying "this is chemistry, its supposed to be dull and boring!" I would tell you that is the absolute untruth! I have read many technical manuals and texts which cover not only difficult material, but present it in an easily readable fashion. This COULD be a fabulous book if the authors would proofread the newest version themselves and correct some of the errors. A large portion of this book is devoted to the accuracy of data and the maximization of signal to noise ratio. With this in mind I find it disturbing that a book which so advocates this has so many errors in it!

First of all, this book is riddled with errors. There are typos up the wazoo! Second, a lot of the optical path diagrams of the instruments are very confusing. You cannot make heads or tales from the illustrations. Skoog has yet to enter the 21st century because everything is in black and white. The picture style is very bland and terribly out of date. Skoog also tries desperately to be pedantic. For example, he describes a computer monitor as a cathode ray tube output device. If you like Atkins, you will love Skoog, or vice versa. It's great as a reference but otherwise worthless. Trust me when I say this book is too wordy, too confusing, and way too 'Cold War' era boring.

I am an undergrad senior majoring in math and chemistry. I noticed a majority of the reviews seemed to be somewhat negative, so I thought I would weigh in. I have found this text to be a real asset. I have used it for a one credit lab in instrumental analysis and really love the attention given to the mathematical representations of the concepts. I don't really plan on working in a lab setting, and I find the text gives a great overview of a lot of instrumentation. Very easy to read and follow. Well worth the money to have it on the bookshelf.