2: The answer to my prayers
I used this text after struggling for the first few weeks in my quantum chemistry course at Berkeley. Recommended by my professor, this text made sense of things that I believed impossible. And, it includes a lot of graphs to boot! I found this book coupled with Griffith's Quantum Mechanics to have been the best possible undergrad combo in my junior year as a chemistry undergrad. In fact, I sold my required text and passed the class with flying colors using just the Atkins book and the Griffith text. Where Atkins is too wordy, Griffith's concise explanations help greatly. And, vice versa, when you need more info, turn to Atkins. Bon chance!
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5: Formidable
I have always had a reverence for quantum mechanics, but now I have dread. Dread that sometimes manifests in awe, but most of the times, grows from confusion, thanks to the heap of frustration from quantum mechanics.I gave the book 4 stars to avoid my biased review doing the injustice to the authors as a result of my own folly, but I must admit that I cannot understand the authors past the chapter on angular momentum (Chapter 4), albeit their breathless enthusiasm to impart the wonder of quantum mechanics to the reader. Probably a formalistic approach that Atkins and Friedman told us they took to present the book hampers my progress. A whole page of obscure subscripts wouldn't seem to help much either. The first three chapter took the familiar analytical route, giving way to the intuition to supply insight and inspire the heart during times of imminent failure, yet the introduction of the quantum mechanical concept of angular momentum by the supposedly clever arguments of subscript manipulation went over my head. And this marks the end of my struggle, for after that I am just a regular mechanic. The humor in this assumedly humorless subject seems to alleviate the pain a bit. (It should strongly be reminded that such humor should only be reserved for the geeky lot, for those college kids are probably too cool to appreciate a joke from, ugh, quantum mechanics.) The book is perhaps too inclined to chemistry (hence Molecular Quantum Mechanics). A considerable amount of mathematical maturity is needed (not necessarily mathematical knowledge), and a readiness to leave your intuition bewildered.
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