ABSTRACT
This chapter is designed to give those readers who have had little exposure to chemistry the basic knowledge needed to understand the material in the rest of the book. Although it is helpful for the reader to have had several courses in chemistry, including organic chemistry and quantitative chemical analysis, most of the material in this book can be understood with less. Indeed, a reader willing to do some independent study on the fundamentals of chemistry can understand much of the material in this book without ever having had any formal chemistry course work.
