Physical Chemistry

A modern, clear, and extensive physical chemistry text. It does break tradition with the heavyweights in the field (Atkins, McQuarrie), but does so for good reason: there aren't enough computational background or computer computation applications in the others. Those books do a great job with the theory and mathematics, but this book show's you how to use that mathematics to really understand chemistry. It focuses heavily computational chemistry with actual software and the Spartan Quantum chemistry software that book's authors use is very inexpensive if you buy the student version. As a bonus, this book is the most colorful and well laid-out and edited one available today.