A direct nonlinear adaptive control of state feedback linearizable single-input single-output systems is proposed in the case when parametric uncertainties are represented linearly in the unknown parameters. The main feature of the proposed nonlinear adaptive control system is that the linearizing coordinate transformation and the state feedback are updated by parametric adaptive law, derived using tile second method of Lyapunov. The proposed adaptive control scheme is relatively straightforward and simple in the sense that it does not use the concept of augmented error. This adaptive control scheme is numerically applied to an exothermic chemical reactor system and is compared with the nonadaptive state feedback linearization which has an integral action. The simulation shows that the proposed adaptive control scheme can be applied effectively to highly nonlinear, uncertain chemical systems.