The Basic Features

• Style This text is different—by design. Today’s students rely more heavily on visual imagery to learn than ever before. I have therefore written a text that uses less prose and more diagrams, equations, tables, and bulleted summaries to introduce and reinforce the major concepts and themes of organic chemistry.
• Content  Organic Chemistry accents basic themes in an effort to keep memorization at a minimum. Relevant materials from everyday life are used to illustrate concepts, and this material is integrated throughout the chapter rather than confined to a boxed reading. Each topic is broken down into small chunks of information that are more manageable and easily learned. Sample problems are used as a tool to illustrate stepwise problem solving. Exceptions to the rule and older, less useful reactions are omitted to focus attention on the basic themes.
• Organization  Organic Chemistry uses functional groups as the framework within which chemical reactions are discussed. Thus, the emphasis is placed on the reactions that different functional groups undergo, not on the reactions that prepare them. Moreover, similar reactions are grouped together so that parallels can be emphasized. These include acid-base reactions (Chapter 2), oxidation and reduction (Chapters 12 and 20), radical reactions (Chapter 13), and reactions of organometallic reagents (Chapter 20).

Illustrations

Organization and Presentation

• Review material—Chapter 1 presents a healthy dose of review material covering Lewis structures, molecular geometry and hybridization, bond polarity, and types of bonding. While many of these topics are covered in general chemistry courses, they are presented here from an organic chemist’s perspective. I have found that giving students a firm grasp of these fundamental concepts helps tremendously in their understanding of later material.
• Acids and bases—Chapter 2 on acids and bases servers two purposes. It gives students experience with curved arrow notation using some familiar proton transfer reactions. It also illustrates how some fundamental concepts in organic structure affect a reaction, in this case an acid-base reaction. Since many mechanisms involve one or more acid-base reactions, I emphasize proton transfer reactions early and come back to this topic often throughout the text.
• Functional groups—Chapter 3 uses the functional groups to introduce important properties of organic chemistry. Relevant examples—PCBs, vitamins, soap, and the cell membrane—illustrate basic solubility concepts. In this way, practical topics that are sometimes found in the last few chapters of an organic chemistry text (and thus often omitted because instructors run out of time) are introduced early so that students can better grasp why they are studying the discipline.
• Stereochemistry—Stereochemistry (the three-dimensional structure of molecules) is introduced early (Chapter 5) and reinforced often, so students have every opportunity to learn and understand a crucial concept in modern chemical research, drug design, and synthesis.
• Modern reactions—While there is no shortage of new chemical reactions to present in an organic chemistry test, I have chosen to concentrate on new methods that introduce a particular three-dimensional arrangement in a molecule, so-called asymmetric or enantioselective reactions. Examples include Sharpless epoxidation (Chapter12), CBS reduction (Chapter 20), and enantioselective synthesis of amino acids (Chapter 28).
• Grouping reactions—Since certain types of reactions have their own unique characteristics and terminology that make them different from the basic organic reactions, I have grouped these reactions together in individual chapters. These include acid-base reactions (Chapter 2), oxidation and reduction (Chapter 12 and 20), radical reactions (Chapter 13), and reactions of organometallic reagents (Chapter 20). I have found that focusing on a group of reactions that share a common theme helps students to better see their similarities.
• Synthesis—Synthesis, one of the most difficult topics for a beginning organic student to master, is introduced in small doses, beginning in Chapter 7 and augmented with a detailed discussion of retrosynthetic analysis in Chapter 11. In later chapters, special attention is given to the retrosynthetic analysis of compounds prepared by carbon-carbon bond forming reactions (for example, Sections 20.11 and 21.10C).
• Spectroscopy—Since spectroscopy is such a powerful tool for structure determination, four methods are discussed over two chapters (Chapters 14 and 15).
• Key concepts—End-of-chapter summaries succinctly summarize the main concepts and themes of the chapter, making them ideal for review prior to working the end-of-chapter problems or taking an exam.