General chemistry (A Series of books in chemistry)

When it was first published, this first-year chemistry text revolutionized the teaching of chemistry by presenting it in terms of unifying principles instead of as a body of unrelated facts. Those principles included modern theories of atomic and molecular structure, quantum mechanics, statistical mechanics, and thermodynamics. In addition, Dr. Pauling attempted to correlate the theories with descriptive chemistry, the observed properties of substances, to introduce the student to the multitude of chemical substances and their properties.