Johnson and Scott's book is part of a chemistry workbook series. It provides a set of exercises designed to help students in the early stages of physical chemistry apprenticeship to learn or review basic concepts necessary for a physical chemistry course. For this book we have the comments of two reviewers, which complement and augment each other.

EJW

This workbook is designed to complement rather than supplement existing textbooks. Its format is one of examples followed by closely coordinated exercises that can be worked directly on the pages of the text itself. The first six chapters present material at a level typically covered in (or before) the first year general chemistry course and the final two chapters move into more sophisticated areas at the level considered in upper-level physical chemistry courses.

Johnson and Scott do accomplish their goals by providing a series of exercises of increasing difficulty. The level of the exercises is quite basic and often involves merely inserting numbers into the appropriate formula. Little additional insight is offered through either direct commentary or suggestions for further consideration by the student. Many students could benefit from at least some of the programmed exercises found in this book. However, the elementary nature of the first few chapters may discourage them from continuing on to the more sophisticated material.

The scope of the material is evidence of the authors' extensive teaching experience. The section on powers of ten includes material describing how to use the exponents to allow multiplication or division without the use of a calculator. Although calculators are certainly ubiquitous, mastery of this particular skill allows students to estimate their result and confirm that their calculated result is at least of the appropriate order of magnitude. The discussion of the difference between a liter and a cubic meter is another example of the authors' understanding of common student pitfalls.

The presentation order is puzzling at times. For example, relative velocity and natural oscillator frequency are introduced in Chapter 2, Calculating Masses of Atoms and Molecules. Both of these topics would be more appropriate later in the text. Conversion factors are occasionally used in problems before the introduction of dimensional analysis in Chapter 3. The answers to each exercise are provided immediately after the exercise, which may tempt students to skip actually writing out the solution to each exercise. Providing the answers at the end of the text, while less convenient, might prevent this potential problem.

Certain students would benefit from this text, but requiring its purchase would be an additional financial burden - especially considering that students would still need to buy the textbook along with any appropriate ancillary materials (i.e., solutions manual). I would recommend this text to students on an individual basis.