This is undoubtably the worst text I have ever seen used at the freshman chem level. It is poorly organized, does not give the student a good grounding in the basics before moving on to more detailed areas and printed with ink and glossy paper that makes reading very difficult. The margins are cluttered with distracting diagrams, flow charts and pictures that have little relavance to what is being discussed in the text. As to organization, it is absurd to introduce thermodynamics in chapter 6, discussing only enthalpy,leaving out entropy and Gibbs free energy, placing them piecmeal in later chapters. This fragmented approach only confuses the student when they can't see the interrelationship between entropy, enthalpy and free energy. The same applies in discussing molarity at the end of chapter 3 instead of leaving it with acid-base and solution chemistry. The fragmented approach is very distracting for both student and instructor. This is my first and hopefully last semester to use this text. For a good text use McMurry-Fay or Davis, Whitten and Galey. Don't use this text if at all possible. I gave it one star because that was the lowest available.

This is a very useful chemistry textbooks for a science student who studies independently. I like this book for several reasons: (1) It is comprehensive, (2) It contains detailed explanatins of WHY and HOW things happen,(3) The book includes numerous worked-out problems, and (4) The book is written in a very readable manner, containing straight-foward language and excellent graphic explanations. I am studying biochemistry now, and I go back to this text very often for the explanation of certain topics, eg. buffer problems. The coverage of organic chemistry is very basic in Silberberg's book. For in-depth coverage refer to Organic Chemistry: Structure and reactivity by Seyhan Ege (ISBN 0395902231), a very good book that emphasizes understanding, not memorization. A note: solutions to all problems in Ege's book are in the study guide.

While I would hesitate to recommend this to someone who had never taken high school chemistry, as a second year high school book and a science majors' level college text, this book is fantastic. Comparing it to an old version of Brady & Humiston, and Zumdahl's Introductory Chemistry, Silberberg wins hands down. Fantastic layout and detailed explanations of most topics. Not good for the most basic topics (don't even think about learning oxidation-reduction reaction balancing from this text).