EPH Publishing, RM38.90, ISBN 978-967-254-740-2
Education, 2025

Are those electric poles on the cover of Success Plus SPM: Chemistry? I’d think that image would be more at home on the cover of a Physics book.

Fortunately, the content is definitely about Chemistry!

The Authors

Once again, the publisher doesn’t include any accolades or credentials that the authors of this book may possess.

I can’t find anything about Tan On Tin online. Loh Wai Leng has some SPM and STPM Physics books to his name, while Ooi Boon Thai is also one of the authors of Spotlight A+1: Physics.

Design

• Just like the other books in the Success Plus SPM line, this book boasts huge graphics and illustrations when compared to those in other SPM Physics reference books from other publishers.
• Amazing use of tables, charts, and diagrams too.
• What I really love is how the book presents steps and instructions in a numbered flowchart manner, large and clear without any risk of the candidate missing a step. No space is spared. The flowchart on how to create solutions from soluble and insoluble salts, for example, takes up an entire page — complete with easy-to-recall lists of which common salts are soluble and which aren’t.

Sure, only a few pages have more than two or three colors, but the lack of color doesn’t detract from the fact that the design and layout of this book are top notch.

Lots of white space to write notes, lots of big illustrations and diagrams and charts that are easy to catch and understand at a glance or two, and everything here can be quickly located if one needs a quick refresher course on something.

This book may look old school, but it’s the fabulous kind of old school! Very practical and, more importantly, usable for revision and practice.

How About the Content?

Here’s the kicker and the main reason why I grade this book slightly lower than Pan Asia Publishing’s Spotlight A+1: Chemistry: the content isn’t any better or worse than that book.

It covers the fundamentals very well, and there are some side boxes for stuff related to KBAT (Kemahiran Berfikir Aras Tinggi; High Order Thinking Skills or HOTS) components, but the KBAT stuff doesn’t cover much ground beyond those already covered by other SPM reference books in the market. Spotlight A+1: Chemistry has this book beat when it comes to KBAT.

That’s not to say that this book is bad, however. It still has:

• Plenty of practice questions within and at the back of each chapter along with a mock SPM paper.
• The practice questions also touch on Paper 3, the practical exam, so it gives good practice for candidates for that paper as well as to answer the occasional question in Paper 2 that asks the candidate to detail how they will set up an experiment to prove a hypothesis.
• The notes are solid for the most part.
• As mentioned earlier, the design is excellent, with content presented neatly and systematically to help candidates grasp fundamental facts and concepts.

It’s just that, aside from the presentation, what this book does, Spotlight A+1: Chemistry does almost everything it does just as well, if not better.

Conclusion

• One can’t go wrong with either Success Plus SPM: Chemistry or Spotlight A+1: Chemistry. Both offer more return for their cost compared to Focus SPM: Chemistry, and they definitely are more up to date and KBAT-friendly than SPM Masterclass: Chemistry.
• My personal recommendation is that if you need more help in understanding fundamentals, this book is a better investment because everything about it is designed to help candidates in that area. Don’t worry too much about KBAT, as for Chemistry, the KBAT components tend to also test one’s fundamentals more often than not.
• If you think that you’re pretty solid when it comes to the fundamentals and you want to be more prepared for KBAT questions in the actual exam, then Spotlight A+1: Chemistry is a likely better investment.