A revised and updated English version of a postgraduate textbook that has grown out of several years of classroom development. The term "inorganic" is used in a broad sense as the book covers the structural chemistry of representative elements (including carbon) in the Periodic Table, organometallics, coordination polymers, host-guest systems and supramolecular assemblies.
Part I of the book reviews the basic bonding theories, including a chapter on computational chemistry. Part II introduces point groups and space groups and their chemical applications. Part III comprises a succinct account of the structural chemistry of the elements in the periodic table. It presents structure and bonding, generalizations of structural trends, crystallographic data, as well as highlights from the recent literature.

This book consists of over 422 problems and their acceptable answers on structural inorganic chemistry at the senior undergraduate and beginning graduate level. The central theme running through these questions is symmetry, bonding and structure: molecular or crystalline. A wide variety of topics are covered, including Electronic States and Configurations of Atoms and Molecules, Introductory Quantum Chemistry, Atomic Orbitals, Hybrid Orbitals, Molecular Symmetry, Molecular Geometry and Bonding, Crystal Field Theory, Molecular Orbital Theory, Vibrational Spectroscopy, Crystal Structure, Transition Metal Chemistry, Metal Clusters: Bonding and Reactivity, and Bioinorganic Chemistry. The questions collected here originate from the examination papers and take-home assignments arising from the teaching of courses in Chemical Bonding, Elementary Quantum Chemistry, Advanced Inorganic Chemistry, and X-Ray Crystallography by the book's two senior authors over the past five decades. The questions have been tested by generations of students taking these courses. The questions in this volume cover essentially all the topics in a typical course in structural inorganic chemistry. The text may be used as a supplement for a variety of inorganic chemistry courses at the senior undergraduate level. It also serves as a problem text to accompany the book Advanced Structural Inorganic Chemistry, co-authored by W.-K. Li, G.-D. Zhou, and T. C. W. Mak (Oxford University Press, 2008).