Chemistry Books

I found this book to be an excellent review of the scientific literature that relates to the chemistry of the origin of life. The author brings forth the concepts and the relevant experiments to those concepts. His diagrams and graphs are a great help towards understanding. I used it as a textbook this past year for an introductory course in which one has at least a college sophmore's knowledge of chemistry and biology. I will be using it again. The more valuable aspect for me was the review of the literature.

The Emergence of Life by Pier Luigi Luisi is a thoughtful book. It is not a book where to find easy answers on how the life appeared on Earth. Rather, on the contrary. The author scholastic and erudition is impressive on subjects from fundamental physics and chemistry up to polictics and language. Luisi included topics as difficult to define as self-organization and emergence, not only in the biological and biochemical context, but also in social behaviour and economics, for example. The text is crystal-clear, based mostly on arguments from others, but also by the author's personal thinkings based on a life long scientific carreer (over 300 scientific publications), first at the ETH-Zurich (Switzerland) then at Rome 3 (Italy). The book is strongly based on scientific support and thoroughly referenced (over 500 scientific references, including papers of scientific journals and books), and includes an excellent subject index. Graphs and figures are of good support to understand the text. I really recommend it for readers interested on the non-trivial hypotheses of life arousal on Earth. A point (?): Luisi does not include any religious discussion in his book. I was very pleased with his well balanced way of thinking.

Emergency Characterization of Unknown Materials is the best reference book I have seen for detailed (but not too technical) information about all the hazardous materials emergency responders face. It is written by Rick Houghton, a retired Captain with the Lansing, Michigan Fire Department. There is a fabulous section with descriptions and information on all of the detection/identification technologies on the market. This is a "must have" for high level HazMat Technicians.

Tony Osborn
Vice President (and retired firefighter)
CBRNE Technologies Corporation

Emergency Characterization of Unknown Materials, Rick Houghton, CRC Press, Boca Raton, FL, 2008, ISBN: 978-0849379680
Review by Paul R. Laska
First, for full disclosure, I am the same Paul R. Laska whose comments appear in advertising blurbs for this book. During his research, Rick Houghton requested I review material dealing with explosives characterization; based upon that introduction, I recognized the value of his work.
Having had the opportunity to read the entire book, my only negative comment is that I wish I had had it much earlier. My science background is as weak as most with a degree in social science; then I entered a field of law enforcement where chemistry is an important aspect. I did attend a field offering of the NFA Haz-Mat Chemistry program. It was a well presented class, and I learned a great deal of organic chemistry, but over the years it faded. The first chapter of Houghton's book, Terms and Definitions, is a wonderful introduction to hazardous materials chemistry...not just organic, but also inorganic. It also covers biological, and importantly to me, radiologicals.
The middle chapter of the book deals with detection technologies. These range from simple "chemistry set" procedures to the variety of field useable and lab based advanced electronic technology that is available today. The final chapter looks at the application of these various technologies to the characterization of an unknown material.
Houghton approaches the material with the understanding that the audience is basically science ignorant. Without talking down, he educates them in the area of hazardous materials chemistry, using simple approaches to explain the whats and whys of the subject. Through wonderful sketches by his son he introduces humor, which he further follows up with his "Commandments of Thy Characterization Strategy."
The photographs in the book are produced in black and white, which Houghton admits are not illustrative of the effects one should be observing. To overcome this, he includes a web link to his site, where the original, color photos are available for review.
Emergency Characterization of Unknown Materials is a well written book for the average firefighter, haz-mat responder, law enforcement clandestine lab/bomb tech/environmental investigator, or anyone else whose assignment includes exposure to unknown chemical materials. It will greatly improve the reader's comprehension of haz-mat chemistry and walk the reader through the technologies and their application in the real world. It has application beyond the field, to the training and educational setting, where it could well serve as a text for basic hazardous materials chemistry classes.

College-level students of chromatography will find the 2-volume reference Encyclopedia Of Chromatography an invaluable reference offering more than just definitions of physics processes and chemistry systems. Topics range widely from the identification of additives in biopolymers and capillary electrophoresis to displacement equilibrium, known in chromatography for its usefulness in analytical scale separations. It's the depth and detail of these articles, arranged as an A-Z encyclopedic reference and authored by major contributors from around the world, which makes the set both authoritative and exhaustive. Add charts, graphs, tables of results and rates, and formulas and you have a far-reaching reference. Specialty collections with solid science holdings will consider this newly updated and expanded second edition of the Encyclopedia Of Chromatography to be a 'must'.

Complete, easy to read, easy to understand! Good reference book for Chromatographers!

Potential energy surfaces are instrumental in all aspects of nanoscale phenomena and they are well suited to be treated as a unifying theme for the study of chemical physics. In this respect, this book is unique... The topics it tackles, while interest to many researchers in manifold fields, have never been distilled into a single volume. And this first effort deserves kudos.

Each chapter(there are 10 chapters in the whole book)is supported with an exhaustive list of references and is reasonably self contained. Moreover, there is an immediate sense of coherence and the topical flow is rather well laid out. However, it is not a textbook with all that it implies. Wales provides a updated (as of the time of his writing (2003)) account of various topics, but none of them are treated assuming a classroom style. However, the reader is referred to the pertinent literature with valuable remarks as to what is to be found in which particular reference. The proofs to the equations are largely avoided but their origin and the physical implications are given a fair treatment. The required
mathematical background to follow the text is rather modest, while the wide spectrum of topics covered curbs its potential as a real page turner for the novice.

The illustrations are abound and in color which is a definitive plus. The binding and the paper quality is first class. The typeface is Donald Knuth`s Computer Modern with 11/14pt letter size, and this genuinely alleviates the reading process. My only quibble is the uneven quality of the images permeating the text as some of them have been culled from different sources.

I think the book serves its purpose very well and it is a good introductory exposition to a subject with utmost importance in nanoscience. I highly recommend it to anyone whose work involves materials science, chemisty or physics.

Wales must have cloned himself multiple times in order to have found time to have written such a comprehensive book. I'll leave the science for people smarter than I to judge, but I'm giving it 5 stars based on its visual impact alone. I just can't get enough of his beautifully created graphics of undulating potential energy surfaces and cluster rearangement pathways (to name but two examples). Wales is showing us the elegance of his chosen field- and in a way that's simple enough for us dullards to appreciate. I wonder if he's considered a second career in designing topologically interesting furniture, upholstered in only the finest convex polyhedra. This book will no doubt become required reading for those in the molecular simulation community and will be especially ideal for those starting out on their phd's.

Minor points: A cursory read has shown a few typographical errors, which should be corrected in future editions. I also found the references at the end of chapters a little unwieldy. It would also have been nice for Wales to have included a bibliography of recommended texts that could be used to take some of the ideas further.

This book is simply outstanding. It assumes knowledge of basic chemistry, and a certain degree of comfort with the mathematics of chemistry, and covers only the basics of thermodynamics, as applied to chemistry. To some degree it even paves the way for the later study of statistical mechanics. I won't claim it makes the material easy to learn, but it does as good a job of this as any other text I've read.

This book makes an excellent supplement to most college chemistry textbooks, which have confusing and generally inadequate discussions of thermodynamics. The exercises are reasonable and quite helpful for understanding the material.

As a last comment, I want to point out that the price is absurd--this is a tiny paperback volume, and as good as it is, it is hardly worth paying more than $40 for; the publishers should be ashamed of themselves.

It is certainly a good intro to Thermodynamics book, but it'stoo skimpy for the money. At only 200 pages, it isn't a completetextbook on the subject, but noteworthy and significant nonetheless.

As a professor taught in environmental chemistry, this book is a very helpful book for students in environmental chemistry studies. The author did an outstanding job of presentation and the text is very well-organized, including a lot of current information. It is certainly a good place for students to start in trying to understand an environmental problem and its correlating knowledge in chemistry.

I have been involved in civil and environmental engineering for years. Most of environmental engineers do not have depth of chemistry and related applied chemistry. Environmental scientists and engineers are not able to go anywhere without chemistry. This book was well written and came in very pretty handy for those class of people. I already tucked it into my book shelf.

The book shipped the next day and was exactly as I had ordered. Would order from them again

I am mainly a student of the biological sciences and I usually am at a loss in chemistry. This book helped me understand concepts that I never thought I could grasp. The concepts follow a logical order; if you can understand this you can go on to this.... All those years chemistry just didn't interest me or sink in. But with this book, I have become more enthusiastic and having a lot of 'ahh, now I get it' moments. That in itself is worth five stars.

This book is extremely helpful and one of the best resources for ethics in science. I myself am not a scientist, but I found it to be an interesting read. I recommend it highly to those who work in labs and scientists in general.

Students in all disciplines need training in ethics. Apparently, using common sense in making ethical decisions doesn't work any more. Science has ethical issues, dealing most with honesty in research and acknowledging other people's work. This book goes through the principles of ethics; this gives a context, a background, to thinking logically in ethics. What registers most with students, though, are the case studies. They are thought provoking and engage the students with real questions to be analyzed. This is the perfect book for a seminar class or a module in a class almost anywhere in the curriculum.

I have found this book very useful. If you have to use enzyme kinetics, and analyze the data, then you really should have this book. That it is recommended by Prof Cornish-Bowden attests to its accuracy.
Personally I find this topic difficult, but this book is well written, and I have a much better understanding of kinetics after getting this book.

Books and reviews on drug design are often disappointing, but Evaluation of Enzyme Inhibitors in Drug Discovery is excellent; it is a book that should be on the shelves of anyone involved in rational drug development, and available to anyone interested in understanding how successful drugs work. It starts by explaining why enzymes are appropriate targets for a drug design in the first place, and goes on to emphasize that inhibiting an enzyme and producing the intended effect on the whole organism is not a trivial matter. As the author remarks, "dogmatic arguments that lead to a priori predictions of what will work best in a biological context more often than not reflect an incomplete understanding".

If rational drug design is ever to become a reality it will involve knowledge of much more than three-dimensional structure, though this sometimes seems to be the only aspect considered. It requires, of course, knowledge of the different kinds of inhibition and how the inhibitor affects enzyme activity at different concentrations of substrates and products. In addition, it requires some knowledge of the metabolic context in which the inhibited enzyme is embedded: if it has almost no flux control then inhibiting it -- even to a high degree -- may have almost no effect on the flux through it (though it may still have large effects on the metabolite concentrations around it). finally it requires understanding of what makes some molecules "drug-like", and others not: it is no use identifying a superb inhibitor of the ideal enzyme if there is no way of delivering it to the target. Copeland deals with all of these points, and others, in an appropriately elementary way. Apart from giving much more information about inhibition than he did in Enzymes (Wiley-Interscience, 2000), here he takes a more leisurely pace and the book should not offer any serious difficulty to anyone wanting to master the subject.

As the author explains, there is much more to enzyme inhibition than just competitive inhibition: some successful drugs are indeed competitive inhibitors, Methotrexate and Viagra among them, but others are not; Finasteride, for example, used for treating benign hypertrophy of the prostate, is an uncompetitive inhibitor of steroid 5alpha-reductase. Classifying inhibitors thus needs more than crude measures of IC50 values, and if these are used at all they need to be used in conjunction with knowledge of how they relate to inhibition constants.

Analysis of the kind set out in the book is essential for understanding why enzyme inhibitors work as drugs, but the sceptical reader may wonder how much of it is post hoc rationalization, and how much was actually used for discovering the drugs. Let us consider the 26 enzyme inhibitors that have become successful drugs that are listed in Chapter 1, from Acetazolamide, an inhibitor of carbonic anhydrase used to treat glaucoma, to Viagra, an inhibitor of phosphodiesterase that is now familiar to everyone. Modern Drug Discovery claimed in 1998 that "Viagra was discovered using a rational drug design approach", but was it? It was not originally conceived as a drug for treating erectile dysfunction, and its usefulness for this discovered almost by chance when it was noticed that some men who participated in clinical trials as a treatment for angina pectoris reported unexpected effects. Even as an inhibitor for phosphodiesterase, Viagra was found by making variations on the structure of Zaprinast, a weak inhibitor that had failed to become a useful anti-allergy treatment. There is little in this history to suggest rational drug design.

There are many good points about this book, but it is often difficult to find them, because the index is very poor. For example, there is a discussion of the characteristics of "drug-like" molecules (Lipinski's rules, etc.), but don't expect to learn this from the index; the only way to find it is to leaf through the pages. Fortunately it comes early in the book, but there are other equally important and equally secret topics later on. In other respects this is a fine achievement, a book that can be enthusiastically recommended.

Evolutionary operation is a strategy for experimentation during production. It is a terrific method for continuous process improvement which is now popular in the new quality movement. Surprisingly, though very practical the approach never caught on when the book originally came out! Box and Draper are famous professors of statistics in the Statistics Department at the University of Wisconsin. Both are excellent writers and each has coauthored other very highly regarded texts.
These techniques are worth considering by anyone involved in producing high quality manufacturing processes. This is the only text that covers the topic.

Evolutionary operation is a strategy for experimentation during production. It is a terrific method for continuous process improvement which is now popular in the new quality movement. Surprisingly, though very practical the approach never caught on when the book originally came out! Box and Draper are famous professors of statistics in the Statistics Department at the University of Wisconsin. Both are excellent writers and each has coauthored other very highly regarded texts.

These techniques are worth considering by anyone involved in producing high quality manufacturing processes. This is the only text that covers the topic.