Apekshik Panigrahi

THE ELEMENTS

First Edition
 PREFACE

There are dozens of really good books out there that both explain the concepts and theories of
chemistry really well, and provide a nice set of problems at the end of each chapter to make you
comfortable with the subject. So the first thing you might want to know is “How is this book different?”
Well there are two major deviations from all the other mainstream books that you will notice in my
writing:
(1) The approach to the subject made in this book is dramatically different from any other (and probably
a dangerous one too). If you are someone who is quite thorough with the sequence of chapters in a
normal chemistry book, then you’ll be quite surprised to see the Table of Contents.

WHAT’S INSIDE
PREFACE i
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iv

PART 1 –
 THE TABLE

Now this table is really powerful. How? Well, at the end of the day, no matter what you are
trying to understand in this subject (chemistry), you’ll always need to refer to this table, AT
LEAST ONCE. Why? Well it’s like a dictionary, or a mini-Wikipedia if you can be a bit more
imaginative. The amount of information hidden inside this tiny table that you can hold with your
bare hands is really is huge. If you master the mystic arts of this periodic table, chemistry will be
a breeze for you. I didn’t know this fact when I started to read books on chemistry, I always had
a hard time figuring out why something happened the way it did. All books that I read somehow
magically told me that if these are the reactants, then these will be the products. I was baffled
as to how they do it. I thought the only way to be able to be really proficient in chemistry is to
commit to memory, all the different types of reactions that I see.