CHEMISTRY TEXTBOOK SUGGESTIONS

You can get all the books on this page quickly and easily from Amazon.co.uk. You can, of course, also buy the books from normal bookshops. However, these days few bookshops keep much beyond the standard revision guides, and so you will probably have to order what you want.

I have split the page into recommendations and suggestions. It is impossible to recommend a book unless you are familiar with it, and the only one I am really familiar with is my chemistry calculations book. That should be useful whatever syllabus you are doing.

Recommendations

Click on the title or the picture to take you to the Amazon.co.uk site for more information including all the reviews.

You will find more details about my calculations book on its own page on this site with a further link to Amazon if you are interested.

Prior to September 2008, I also recommended Advanced Level Practical Work for Chemistry by Andrew Hunt, which would be really useful to anyone struggling with chemistry practical at AS or A level - especially for practical assessment or practical exams. I have also described that in detail on another page. Unfortunately this is now out of print, but if you can find a second-hand copy, you should buy it.

Suggestions

These suggestions cover UK-based Chemistry courses for 16-18 year olds, including A level, IB and Scottish Highers. If you want to make life as easy as possible for yourself, I think there is a lot to be said for using books designed especially to cover your particular syllabus. The content is then exactly what you need - and no more.

The alternative is to use a short revision guide for all the facts, and to get your explanations in detail from a website like Chemguide. I'm not going to give you details for general revision guides - you need to look at these in a bookshop so that you can see how easy they are to follow. They are very variable - some are much more confusing than others.

Books for specific syllabuses

UK A level syllabuses

AQA

Edexcel

OCR

Salters

WJEC

CCEA

Other A level-equivalent syllabuses

The statement in red above doesn't apply to any of these syllabuses.

Cambridge International (CIE) A level Chemistry

International Baccalaureate (IB)

Scottish Highers

AQA

Edexcel

OCR

(Care! Don't get confused with the Salters syllabus also produced by OCR. That is also known as OCR Chemistry B. The list below excludes books designed for Salters.)

Salters

WJEC

CCEA

CCEA seem to be about to publish a series of books covering individual units of the CCEA chemistry AS and A level course. The first of these (for Unit 1) is due to be published at the end of 2012.

I've added the window into Amazon now (April 2012) because I shall probably forget to do it nearer the time. The search should produce a more useful set of results as these books become available.

I notice that the author of the new Unit 1 book has also produced a GCSE revision guide for CCEA which you may be familiar with.

IB

Make sure that you only look at editions published from 2007 onwards to allow for syllabus changes.

Scottish Highers

You will find lots of references below, but some are quite old. Treat this with some care, and take advice from your teachers and other people who are following the same course.

Cambridge International (CIE) A level Chemistry

CIE published a new book in January 2011 covering the whole of the A level course, including the Applications section. The book includes a CD-ROM.

This has been written by a completely different set of authors from the old book and the Applications Support Booklet - and it shows!

The new book is written in an extremely student-friendly way - quite unlike the Applications Support Booklet. The introduction to the book claims:

"The language has been kept simple, with bullet points where appropriate, in order to improve the accessibility to all students. Principal Examiners have been involved in all aspects of this book to ensure that the content gives the best possible match to both the syllabus and to the type of questions asked in the examination."

That's not to say that there won't be mistakes in the book, and perhaps odd bits missed out. That is fairly inevitable in a new book however much care is taken over it. I know from my own experience that, however many people check the book however many times, you never find the last mistake until after the work is published.

I have so far only read parts of the book, but I have no hesitation in recommending it. It is fairly expensive, but if you can possibly afford it, buy it. It should make your life a lot easier.

You can find out more about it by following the link below.

Cambridge International AS and A Level Chemistry Coursebook with CD-ROM

If you come across copies of the older CIE A level chemistry books (the most recent one published in 2004), ignore them, however cheap they might be - they don't match the current syllabus.

Apologies if the page doesn't work in your browser!

Few things irritate me more than pages which don't work properly in the browser of my choice. Anyone who has used, say, Safari on an Apple Mac in the past will know the feeling when you are told that you are using an "illegal browser". (That actually happened to me!) And now I am falling into the same trap myself!

In order to get reliably up-to-date lists of books without me having to trawl through Amazon every few weeks, I decided this time to make use of code provided by Amazon to open windows into their site. It simply makes life a great deal easier for me, and provides a better service to most of my audience. Obviously, Amazon will provide code which works on the majority of current browsers - but that's not much consolation if you use a less common one, and so I apologise.

There is also a way around it, although in not such an elegant way . . .

Copy and paste the following search phrases into the keywords box:

for AQA: aqa level chemistry

for Edexcel: edexcel level chemistry

for OCR: ocr -salters -B level chemistry

for Salters: salters level chemistry

for WJEC: wjec chemistry

for CCEA: ccea level chemistry

for IB: ib diploma chemistry

for Scottish Highers: scottish higher chemistry