Quantum Chemistry, 2nd Edition

I used this book as a supplement to Levine in an honors Pchem class. All in all, I was pleasantly surprised by the readability of McQuarrie's text. The material is clearly presented, the progression is very well structured. McQuarrie's lightweight presentation and mathematical asides made my journey through the material relatively smooth and rapid; a refreshing breeze after the heavy roaring of Levine's more exacting and thorough treatment of the subject. As a bonus for those of us who like to learn by doing, a very well written and comprehensive solution manual is available for the text.

I'm not going to repeat what other reviewers have said other than to note that this book covers the mathematics of quantum in sufficient detail so that you're never lost. Quantum is hard enough as it is without authors skimping on explictness. Other books for undergrad quantum chem: Quantum Chemistry (5th Edition) by Ira N. Levine. 6th edition coming soon. This book is also strong. Molecular Quantum Mechanics by Atkins, Friedman. I used an earlier version of this book and found it very confusing. Skips lots of steps in the math and writing as not as clear as it should be. But you should get the dictionary by Atkins entitled "Quanta: A Handbook of Concepts". very helpful. Can also try the classic "Introduction to Quantum Mechanics with Applications to Chemistry" by Linus Pauling, E. Bright Wilson, Jr. First published in 1935 but still viable after 70 years! If you want to start with some simpler books look at: Introduction to Quantum Mechanics (2nd Edition) by David J. Griffiths (ISBN 0131118927) first and then you may want to pick-up: Quantum Mechanics for Chemists (Tutorial Chemistry Texts, 14) by David O. Hayward, ISBN: 0854046070 Quantum Mechanics 1: Foundations (Oxford Chemistry Primers, 48) by N.J.B. Green Quantum Mechanics 2: The Toolkit (Oxford Chemistry Primers, 65) by N.J.B. Green Look at my other reviews for other chemistry books.

I'd say this book is an excellent book at both the graduate and undergraduate level. Contrary to one of the reviewers. It's very straightforward, and written with the less gifted 'physics' student in mind. It's not the only book you'll need, but it certainly helps understand all the rest of them.Meaning that derivations are crystal clear, and difficult math is actually worked out on almost every occasion. It's got really nice coverage of the basics, which leads up to the H atom, multielectron atoms and the variety of computational methods for use with them, and the same level of coverage with molecules. And there is a chapter on time dependent solutions, which I haven't yet read. It's even got pictures of studly physicists in it. I'd totally recommend this out of all the other quantum books I've encountered. Though you will need to supplement it with other books if you go deep into quantum. And there's some development of spin, but not the full deal. Angular momentum could have been treated a bit more thoroughly as well, for a graduate class. I think there is a snippet or two about bra-ket notation. But that's best learned from a nice quantum mechanics book really, none of the chemistry oriented books cover that aspect well, because it's really rooted more in the 'physics' interpretation of quantum. I'd also point out that the books I've seen that cover the theory exhaustively are pretty short on well worked out example problems, and are kind of hard to understand sometimes. Not the case with this book.Anyways, I wouldn't have taken the time to write this if I didn't think it was money well spent. My advisor even likes it, and he got his PhD in Feynman diagrams.

Donald McQuarrie presents the fundamental aspects of Quantum chemistry in an efficient logical manner. The text had excellent problems with solutions, and a readily comprehendable mathematical framework. Unfortunatly, the final chapter treatment of spectroscopy was somewhat inadequte.