Description
Consider a typical student who has finished a two-semester introductory course in organic chemistry and then picks up an issue of the Journal of Organic Chemistry. He or she finds the real world of the practicing organic chemist to be mostly out of reach, on a different level of understanding. This text is intended to bridge that gap and equip a student to delve into new material.
There are two things to know while studying organic chemistry. One is the actual chemistry, that is, the behavior of compounds of carbon in var-ious circumstances. The other is the edifice of theory, vocabulary, and symbolism that has been erected to organize the facts. In first-year texts, there is an emphasis on the latter with little connection to the actual observables. Thus students are able to answer subtle questions about reactions without knowing quite how the information is obtained. Chemistry is anchored in observations of specific cases, which can then be obscured by the abstractions. For this reason, this text includes specific cases with more details and literature references to illustrate the general principles. Understanding these cases is also an exercise to ensure the understanding of those principles in a concrete way.
This book is by necessity a selection. Subjects that are generally well covered in introductory texts are omitted or briefly reviewed here. Advanced topics are treated to a functional level, but not exhaustively. Specifically, the subjects are those necessary for understanding and searching the literature and some topics that are the elements of many current journal articles. The outcome is a selected sampling on a scale with latitude for creative lecturers to amplify with their own selections. Advanced texts give much attention to classical work that led to modern understanding. This text, with all due respect to the originators, does not cover that familiar ground but again covers current examples grounded in those classical ideas with modern interpretation.
There is a modicum of arbitrariness in the selections, and, considering this text as a new experiment, the author would welcome suggestions for substitutions and improvements.