Plan of the book

This introductory chapter has set the scene, and the next one discusses general tools and concepts that are widely relevant to the chapters that follow. The next nine chapters all deal with particular techniques or groups of related methods. When using a technique, it might not be essential to know in detail how a particular instrument or some computational method works, though such understanding may well help in collecting the best or most useful data. But what is absolutely vital is for chemists to be able to interpret the structural information they obtain. In this book, we have therefore put the major emphasis on such interpretation. As far as we can, we present spectra or other experimental information to illustrate the points we make. 

Each chapter is also supported by a series of review questions for you to test your own understanding, and a series of discussion problems, which we hope will be a valuable resource for tutors (and, of course, their students). The answers to the review questions and some notes on the discussion problems can also be found on the book s website (see Section 1.5). 

The last chapter differs from the rest of the book. Here we present a collection of case histories , in which we discuss examples from the chemistry research literature on what has been learned about chemical structures using all appropriate physical and computational methods. It draws on what has been derived and explained in Chapters 2-11, but from the point of view of the chemist who has a compound and wants to know as much as possible about it rather than that of someone with a particular instrument or simulation software 

Inside the front cover of the book is a periodic table, which includes some usefiil data relevant to structural methods. Inside the back cover there is a molecular symmetry point-group decision tree, refined over many years of teaching undergraduate students. It refers to the symmetry species most often encountered in molecular inorganic chemistry. Character tables are available in the on-line supplementary material for Chapter 2. 

Inorganic chemists have many different questions to ask about different types of system, and it is not possible to explain how to answer aU of them in a single text. This book is written from the point of view of the chemist who has to deal with well-defined chemical species, although a good deal of what is described would also be useful to a solid-state scientist. The principles of structure determination apply equally to organic compounds too, although the relative importance of the techniques might be different 

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Bearing this situation in mind we wished to describe the present status of studies on chemistry and its applications of technetium and rhenium. A part of this book was planned before the "Topical Symposium on the Behavior and Utilization of Technetium 93" was held in Sendai, Japan in March 1993, but the planning of the book in this style was accelerated after the symposium by suggestions from our friends. The editors are grateful for the cooperation from the contributes and the publisher. 

While the main plan of the book has not been altered, sections have been brought up to date by the addition of improved methods and new references, particularly to Organic Syntheses. ... 

Although the book has been largely rewritten, and a considerable enlargement has seemed unavoidable, its plan remains unchanged namely, to provide a text-book of Surface Chemistry and Physics, and also to give an account of our knowledge of Surface Films in some little detail. The chapter on the properties of molecules, deduced from methods other than those of Surface Chemistry, has been omitted, partly because it is irrelevant to the main plan of the book, but also because information on this subject is now much more readily accessible than it was in 1929. An account of electrical phenomena at surfaces has been added. 

The present Fourth Edition has been updated and also, when necessary, extended. However, I did not take the opportunity to change the plan of the book the existing subdivision of the book in seven parts and 27 Chapters has not been changed. The following shows where small changes were made or where the text was extended greatly. 

The original outline for this book was developed with the assistance of Professor E. C. Roche, Jr., and was reviewed by Professor D. B. Marsland of the North Carolina State University at Raleigh. We are grateful to both of them for their help in the initial planning of the book. 

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