[PDF] Inorganic Chemistry by Catherine Housecroft

Inorganic Chemistry, 4th Edition by Catherine Housecroft :: Overview: Like previous editions of this popular, internationally recognized text, the fourth edition of Inorganic Chemistry provides a sound foundation for undergraduate and graduate students in physical inorganic principles, descriptive inorganic chemistry, bioinorganic chemistry and applications, including catalysis, industrial processes and inorganic materials. Maintaining students’ attention during discussions of the descriptive chemistry of the elements requires effort on the part of the lecturer. Towards this end, Inorganic Chemistry makes extensive use of highly illustrated boxed material to emphasize the roles of inorganic elements and compounds in our everyday lives and in biology, medicine, the environment and industry. The inclusion of up to date literature references allows readers to readily explore the topics further. The eye-catching topic boxes achieve their aim of bringing inorganic chemistry alive. Just as important is boosting the intellectual confidence of students. Inorganic Chemistry achieves this through large numbers of worked examples, self-study exercises and end-of-chapter problems. The latter are organized in three sections: problems that focus on specific aspects of a given chapter, overview problems and a set of problems (‘inorganic chemistry matters’) that link inorganic chemistry to applications and topical research issues. These last problem sets are new to the fourth edition and aim to test students’ knowledge in a manner that links the theme of a chapter to the real world.A major change from previous editions of Inorganic Chemistry is the removal of the detailed discussion of nuclear chemistry. This decision was not made lightly, but came after consideration of comments from the review panel set up by the publisher and from discussions with a number of colleagues. A proportion of the material still appears in the text. For example, an introduction to decay chains is now described with the actinoid metals in Chapter 27. Chapter 4 is new to the fourth edition and pulls together the experimental techniques that previously were scattered through the book in themed boxes. The inclusion of a large number of worked examples, self-study exercises and end-of-chapter problems in this chapter benefits students and teachers alike, and also ensures that the text can support inorganic practical classes in addition to lecture courses. The techniques covered in Chapter 4 include vibrational, electronic, NMR, EPR, Mo¨ssbauer and photoelectron spectroscopies and mass spectrometry in addition to purification methods, elemental analysis, thermogravimetric analysis, diffraction methods and computational methods. The practical issues of IR spectroscopy detailed in Chapter 4 complement the group theory approach in Chapter 3.