@violets2217 @Vicki C
I just opened it somewhere in the middle (part II: Basic Chemistry – pun intended???), and got caught in the prose with which he introduces the fundamentals of liquid chemistry. He really does an awesome job of reducing things to the bare minimum, and explaining it in an entertaining way (without compromising correctness). I seriously doubt I could do it any better. He really takes a lot of time to avoid all the errors of pedagogical distance that are ubiquitous in many academic textbooks. C'mon, he describes how he overshot in a titration, and explained what he did to get to the level of precision he aimed for, when things don't go as intended! How awesome is this?
I am just enjoying how he builds a narrative around things (and tbh I'm also skimming over some parts, like the rightfully pedantic but largely repetitive lab instructions for the experiments). Honestly, I'm yet to find anything that is genuinely
new to me. But as said, I'm just at chapter 10, and all the exciting soapy things are still to come yet.
ETA: Well, that's not
entirely correct. I have learned the reason behind his weird non-standard atom colour scheme, that has baffled me in every of his graphics (some C and H atoms are turquoise, others are white; some O atoms are red, others green). It's actually quite clever! He can encode the polarity of moieties (atoms/atom groups) in a way that is easily visible in colour (turquoise = non-polar/hydrophobic, red/white = polar/hydrophilic), but survives when the graphics are printed B/W (the higher the local contrast, the more polar the molecular regions).