Organic Chemistry

Rating:
Summary: Stupendous
Review: A number of times, fellow students entering organic chemistry have asked to buy my Loudon textbook and the accompanying study guide. But I declined - "my Loudons" are staying with me for the long haul, I said, as I encouraged them to buy their own new copies.

This book is simply marvelous. It has plenty of stimulating illustrations and examples, and its many problems progress gradually from trivial to challenging and instructive. (I did every end-of-chapter problem for the first eleven chapters, and the resulting factual retention and depth of understanding have served me extremely well.) But, most importantly, its exposition is rock-solid, full of the lucid analogies and consistent mechanistic logic that make organic chemistry tractable. It was telling that I started to get irritated with the book after 800 or so pages. When I asked myself why, I realized that it was no fault of the text but simply that fact that Loudon had already improved my thinking so greatly that I was constantly anticipating him! The study guide/solutions manual is also indispensable - it has fully worked-out solutions to every single problem as well as "Study Guide Links" covering more peripheral (but often very interesting and useful) material.

To be sure, the book is on the wordy side, and it is not completely comprehensive, though these attributes are quite acceptable in an introduction. To a p-chem kid like me, the treatment of the physical phenomena underlying NMR and IR spectroscopy was far too superficial, though the explanations were fine for structure determination. Loudon scattered valuable and compact spectral tables throughout the second half of the book as the corresponding functional groups were introduced, which made the book harder to use as a spectroscopy reference than it could have been. Its CD-ROM is a little hokey, and its price has kept going up, as this web page makes evident.

But these drawbacks pale in comparison to Loudon's stupendous treatment of the basic substance. My Loudons have given me strategies to tackle problems in nanopatterning research, they have gotten me through problem sets in cell biology, and they will stay with me as a reference as long as I am a chemist. They will not disappoint.

Rating:
Summary: This is the best organic chemistry book
Review: I have the 1984 edition and it's still my favorite. I love this book! The book is conversational in tone and very easy to read. The electron diagrams lead to understanding rather than memorizing organic chemistry reactions. The explanations are through. The graphics and text are balanced. The problems are interesting and challenging. The accompanying solution manual provides all the details needed to completely understand the answers. This book shows that chemistry can be beautiful and understandable. I am sure that it has only gotten better in later editions. Thank you, Dr. Loudon, for writing such a wonderful book.

Rating:
Summary: An Acceptable Organic Text
Review: I sold my textbooks that I had used for Organic I (Wade), and Organic II (Solomons) in the middle of the semester and bought this one instead (since our teacher doesn't use the book, only his notes). I found this book so much easier to learn from. Especially for someone who has had trouble learning the subject.

Rating:
Summary: BEST ORGANIC TEXT
Review: I sold my textbooks that I had used for Organic I (Wade), and Organic II (Solomons) in the middle of the semester and bought this one instead (since our teacher don't use the book, only his notes). I found this book so much easier to learn from. Especially for someone who has had trouble learning the subject.

Rating:
Summary: This is the best organic chemistry book
Review: I thought the book was well organized. The example problems helped students better understand the material. I liked how Loudon keeps reviewing older material in later chapters to make studying for finals easier. This book is used @ cornell univ and harvard univ.

Rating:
Summary: Good, but not good enough
Review: This is a great introductory textbook for organic chemistry, but for accelerated chemistry courses, it simply failed to give more advanced materials and examples.
I ended up getting another organic chemistry textbook to complement it. Still one of the most understandable organic textbook around, though.

Rating:
Summary: An Acceptable Organic Text
Review: This is the text we teach from in the accelerated organic course at Harvard. While it is a very readable text, and that is important, it is not very technical and many definitions (see Curtin Hammer principle) are just plain incomplete. A good text for a simple course but no real weight here.