ISBN9780935702996

At first, this book - judging from its thickness - scared me. I owned 3 different 3 P-Chem books prior to this. They were dry, hard to comprehend and worst, they had a lot of typos. So when I saw this text by McQuarrie, I thought that it'd be one of those books that i had to buy for class.
After reading the first chapter, I could tell that this text was worth buying. Not only that it gives me the essential mathematical skills to approach p-chem, but it also informs me the applications of p-chem in both chemistry and biology. Best of all, it has the least 'typos' in comparison to other text.

The only drawback about this book is the paper. It's very thin - and i understand why. If it were printed in a regular paper, this book would have been twice as thick.

This text is the standard text at UC Berkeley.

To be succinct:
1) Thorough explanation of each subject.
2) Subjects broken down into manageable chapters.
3) Lots of worked problems.
4) Lots of problems at the end of each chapter.
5) Material presented in a logical, not necessarily historical, fashion.
6) Layout is generally superior to other texts (spacious, not cramped)
7) Get the solutions manual.

Bear in mind most schools teach thermodynamics and kinetics, followed by quantum chemistry. This methodology is merely a reflection of the order of discovery, and not because quantum chemistry necessarily builds on thermo or kinetics. This text teaches quantum first, followed by thermo and kinetics. It's more logical to teach quantum first, but you can jump right into traditional physical chemistry with this text.

Only recommendation:
The publisher should package the book with the solutions manual. I'm a big fan of solutions manuals and a student is somewhat hobbled without one.

I received the correct book in excellent condition (matching the seller's description) in the timeframe I was told when I purchased it.

This is one of the poorest textbooks I've ever owned. It is wordy yet it explains very little. And there is one really annoying aspect to this book:
The authors only ever introduce an equation once in the text. From thereon, they refer to that equation as "equation 17-1" or whatever number they designate it. So you're constantly having to turn back pages and entire chapters just to find out what stupid equation they are talking about. They also embed all the important tables within random chapters instead of being in an appendix, so good luck finding any constants or any other figures that would be put in a table.
Another bad thing about this book is that they made an update to it and added two chapters but didn't change the ISBN. So some people get the newer version with the correct number of chapters and some people will pay the same price for the book missing at least 2 chapters that they will need in their p-chem class (this happened to my girlfriend who has the older book and I have the newer one and we didn't discover this until the fourth test!). I hate this book with a passion. It has crappy black and white illustrations,and instead of writing fractions like ft/sec or mol/L they write ft*sec(-1) and mol*L(-1) and it gets quite distracting when they have several terms in the denominator. It looks like it was written in the 70's. I will say as a side-note that it's very much worth getting the solutions manual if you get this book. The solutions manual is pretty well-done.

For those students who are REQUIRED to derive everything on their PCHM exams, THIS IS THE BOOK FOR YOU! Excellent supplement to that weak and required text book of yours, for sure. Good luck! PCHMI (Thermo-C) PCHMII (Q. Mechanics-B)