Customer Reviews

Advanced Organic Chemistry : Reactions and Synthesis (Part B)

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

While a bit dated (1990), it is nevertheless a comprehensive overview of organic synthesis suitable for upper-level undergraduates or graduate students in organic chemistry. Unlike reference works like March, it is more of a textbook - however, a good number of references (with few mistakes) are provided. Along with part "A" of the series and a more reference-oriented work such as March, it provides a solid foundation and entry point to the literature for advanced students of organic chemistry.

I found this book extremely easy to read and makes a great addition to the library owned by an organic chemist. Certainly, this book deserves much attention and I believe that it describes many concepts in a simpler manner when comparison to Jerry March's book is called upon. The book is well-written and is exactly what undergraduate students interested in organic chemistry need to read if they want to expand their knowledge of the field without getting into a complex text right away. Definitively, I recommend this book in the shelf of any practicing and non-practicing chemist.

I thought that the book was clear and interesting. It explained the reactions in sufficient detail for the first graduate level organic class I took.

My only complaint was that there was no answer guide. The answers are given as literature references, necessitating that you go look them up. When you are assigned 30 of his problems, that's not a trivial task, especially when some of the journals are esoteric. Also, finding the journal isn't enough, as often the journal citation has nothing to do with the problem. The "answer molecule" might just appear somewhere in that article.

And then, to add insult to injury, there are errors in the citations.

It's a great reference, but I wish that the problems in the book had more readily available answers.

This review is specifically meant to refer to the latest edition (5th ed.) of this book. The earlier editions were quite good, but the 5th edition completely misses the mark. Ordinarily, one would think that a book such as this would get better and better with each new edition. Not so with this book. For some reason, the 5th edition is loaded with mistakes.....many of these appear to be typesetting errors (e.g., atoms in the wrong place, pentavalent carbons, nonsense intermediates within reaction pathways, etc.). It is terribly disappointing. I do not know what happened at the publisher this time, but, in good conscience, they really should not have released this book the way it is. It does not appear to have been the authors' fault, but rather it was likely the fault of Springer (the publisher). This looks like an example of the mindless side of capitalism....large publishing companies who have already taken over much of their competition also have ridiculous deadlines to meet quarterly earnings goals, so they rush through the publication process and end up turning out garbage. The only way that these companies ultimately avoid getting into a heap of trouble with the FTC or other consumer advocate agencies is by issuing online addendums filled with corrections to the myriad of errors. Ask yourselves, is that why you want to buy a new book..... so that you have to download a 50-page corrections addendum to fix all of the errors that the publisher missed or opted not to correct in the first place? This sort of thing is happening more and more these days in the publishing industry, even with software. And the larger and larger these publishing companies become, the more we see it. I recommend that you DO NOT BUY the 5th edition of this book; it should have been recalled by the publisher, and everyone who bought it should have received a refund. However, if you really want to buy Carey and Sundberg's book, then buy the 4th edition used; you will be much happier. Apparently, Springer scaled back on qualified staff and/or hired a bunch of publishing flunkies sometime between the release of the 4th and 5th editions of this book.

I've had a number of upper level courses. This (and part B) may be good for undergrads taking an advanced course but not for grad school. There are a number of errors and important subjects are glossed over or not covered at all. The best part of either of these books are the questions at the end of the chapters. There are lots and lots of questions. If you need it for a class, I'm sorry, if you're looking for a comprehensive advanced organic textbook, get the latest edition of March's book.

As a previous review suggested, this book fell short of expectations. There are in fact quite a few errors (i.e. pentavalent carbons, etc.); such errors are especially prevalent in the problem section of the book. Moreover, the book does contain many outdated problems.

Although the organization of the book isn't horrible, it isn't a very readable text, mainly due to the detail they go into in explanations of seemingly irrelevant things. In other words, this book is not very conducive to skimming, or good at all for review; especially when it comes to the carbon acid section. Rather than simply stating general trends of carbon acids, they go into detail about the different methods for measuring the pKas of carbon acids, and the different advantages and disadvantages to such methods. While this may be of interest to some people, it simply makes the section much less readable, perhaps a short summary at the end of each section summarizing general concepts would help alleviate this error. So rather than having to sift through 20 pages of mostly worthless crap to find one simple concept, it would be briefly outlined in the end (or beginning) of a section, or chapter.

Perhaps the thing that annoys me most about this book, however, is the absolutely horrible way in which structures are presented in the book. Rather than sticking to simple Line-bond structures (or carbon skeletons, whatever you know them as), molecules are presented as an obnoxious mixture of both. In some cases (i.e. ylides, and such) actually labling carbons and hydrogen atoms can be useful. However, when you get to the problem section and see something to the effect of - CH2=C(CH2)3CH2CHO - rather than a simple line-bond structure, it becomes obnoxious very quickly. Moreover, in larger molecules, they tend to show cycles in line-bond format, and substituents as shown above. I know that being able to convert back and forth between the structures is important in organic chemistry, but if you are going on to advanced organic and you can't convert between the two, then I think you have bigger issues.

The main problem with this way of showing molecules is that it it makes it much more annoying while solving the problems (which can bw annoying enough with all the errors), especially while doing either mechanisms or synthesis problems, you have to draw out the line-bond structure anyways in order to be able to clearly visualize larger molecules, so showing molecules the way they do, in almost every case (with a few exceptions) is completely idiotic. Furthermore, the way they represent molecules in the text makes it much more prone to typesetting errors (i.e. pentavalent carbons, and the like). But who knows, maybe they are working in errors on purpose so they can revise is to bring out another edition.

In my opinion, in order for this book to be suitable for actually studying and learning adv. organic chemistry, this book needs a massive overhaul. Until them, reading this book to learn chemistry is about as effective as reading an English dictionary in other to learn English.

I forgot to enter the number of stars field; Amazon automatically put 5, and I cannot edit this out. The text deserves 2 or 3 stars. This text was required for my graduate course in reactions at Florida State University. I went on to take my advanced synthesis course, which requires references for all synthetic transformations. Naturally, it seemed easy to reference the Carey and Sundberg text for the more basic steps. Even there, my professor took issue with many of the topics we covered in class with reference to this text. He said he was going to put this on his list of "texts not to buy..." I respect this professor highly, therefore I take it seriously that he disapproves ot it. I wish I would have just begun with a more up to date book without the errors or misrepresentations. On the plus side, this book is well organized and has a good index. However, I wish it came in a hard back; mine is falling apart.

Both A and B part are very good reference book for organic chemistry graduate student. It is worth to have one if you want to open your career in organic chemistry

I study organic chemistry in trondheim Norway, and we use this book in one of our classes. I think it's a good book, but it's too detailed some times. We have almost the whole book to learn for the exam befor summer, and too many details makes it harder to read, but you learn how to take whats the most important.

Overall this is a good book to learn organic synthesis.

Overall, I didn't much enjoy reading this book, as its style is basically to present one reaction after another. I did learn a lot, however. I think the book would be helped by having some unifying strategy of synthesis presented. I read Warren's _Organic Synthesis: the Disconnection Approach_ along with this one and it helped a great deal with getting a grasp of the big picture of organic synthesis.