Not essential - just makes doing homework 5 times easier.
Written: Jan 24 '04 (Updated Jan 26 '04)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: had about half the problems and exercises of the book, includes calculations and word explanations
Cons: solutions are often not very clear, have to work out some steps by yourself
The Bottom Line: If you're dong homework graded according to correctness - this book is absolutely required! Shortens HW time and provides practical knowledge to the theory of the text.
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| djork's Full Review: |
Solution manuals for a subject like Physical Chemistry can prove to be a very useful thing. I am personally extremely glad I was not too greedy to go out and buy this book in addition to my textbook. Somehow I survived quantum mechanics section without it - that part is more theoretical - but the thermodynamics part set me out to search online deals for this manual. It really helps with figuring out the details!
In a couple of words, the usefulness of this manual is inscribed in the following:: it would take a long time to try and figure out everything by yourself from the text. Some info required for the problems is not covered in detail in the text - and whether it is you who have omitted that info during reading, or the textbook, it will take a long time to find all the needed information yourself. While the manual shows your what you have to do right away, with all preliminary info recorded right there. My homework time has considerably receded from many hours spent at home, in TA's offices, and in Discussion sections to just half a day of even less on my own!
This manual contains solutions for all 27 chapters of the 7th ed Physical Chemistry textbook by written by Atkins. It has solutions to both problems and exercises - but to pity, not for every single one. Apparently, problems solved in this manual have been randomly picked. But here is the GOOD PART: the problems that have been solved there are usually the "juicy" ones, the kind that professors like to assign. I find that most problems on my homeworks can be solved with help from this book. If you already have the textbook, you might notice that exercises labeled by same number but different letters (i.e. a or b) are practically the same. The the manual contains all the "a" exercise solutions. But anyone can quickly solve the "b" exercises taking "a" solutions as example.
It is ALSO true that solution manuals are a great source for piecing some equations together! (Now that is why I found myself needing this badly in the thermo part, which is rather detailed). While reading the theory from the text, it is hard to see how you can relate all the equations to each other and use them to solve a specific problem yourself. It may take some thinking, some time at the office hours, some copying from friends. But this Solutions Manual provides a quick fix for such problems - just looking over the solutions you can understand which equations to use where. Then you can reason out yourself why this equation or that one was applies there.
Figuring out what equation to use and where is much less mistake-prone if you're looking over some problems that have already been solved. Trying to catch all the info from the text -- well, good luck on doing that -- most of us do miss out on something. Theory is great - but an average chapter in this book has too much to grasp at the same time. Introducing this "study aide" will better your study skill on this subject and save a lot of time -- and I believe it is the only study aide for this book.
Now the drawbacks are that solutions sometimes omit steps. So you can't just copy them over -- you have to know some theory in advance. The steps omitted in 80% of cases you can easily work out yourself. It does a great deal for your own understanding. Other times, however, I found solutions refer to a previous problem for some relation - and then go figure how they obtained it in that problem ... so especially on problems that require derivation, whole chunks may be skipped. That is true of any solutions manual however. Generally solutions are clear and have some explanations to them written in words.
More details:
Authors - Atkins and Trapp
Pages - 550
List price - about $50 for paperback
For separate solutions to problems you may visit Cramster.com - a paid site. Rumors also have it that it is possible to buy solutions to separate chapters on the "official site of the producers" for reduced price. But I do not know anyone or any site currently that have done this.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
djork
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Location: south CA, USA
Reviews written: 19
Trusted by: 0 members
About Me:
College student in sciences; traveled some; love coffee, cats, plants, trips, music, and the net
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