Customer Reviews

Microscale Organic Laboratory: with Multistep and Multiscale Syntheses

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

 

 

I used this text for my organic labs (2 semesters, for majors). I thought the book was pitiful. From the undergrad's perspective, it was disorganized, unclear, verbose; generally excessive. The black and white pages with black line figures are not exactly a pleasure to read. I HAD to buy it. I hope you don't!

I have had some terrible professors, but I have NEVER had a book that was as insufficient and wholly undeveloped in its topic. Mayo et al. may know what they are doing in the laboratory, but they must know NOTHING of writing books to convey knowledge. Someone told me that this is the most widely used book for organic chemistry labs. If that is true, I hate to see the sad state of science in a few years when we start to see all the chemists it produces. Because of the overwhelming difficulty of the problems in this book, students are forced to concentrate on specific answers to the questions that are asked and not on the concepts overall. The result: for all the complexity and effort involved, the student learns NOTHING. The second half of the book outright states (in the intro to Chapter 7) that "the mechanisms ... are more involved and not generally developed at the introductory level." I am an undergraduate student whose second semester of organic chemistry lab far outstrips the two- semester academic textbook.

Chances are you are not buying this book for your home organic lab. You probably are buying this for a class. I feel sorry for you.

This is one of the worst textbooks I have ever used. Luckily, we only used to for one week...I couldn't imagine having to use it for any longer than that. Unfortunately there isn't an option for zero stars.

I have had many lab books and this one is the worst. The layout is confusing. While in my experience my lab manuals have been in bullet, short paragraph form, this book was in a longer format. The procedure is not outlined in clear steps and I haven't gone through the entire book yet but in at least one case so far there was a critical part of the procedure left out of the book that my lab TA had to mention. There is also a poor flow of thoughts in the book. Each section requires you to go back and read pages earlier in the book in order to understand what the current lab exercise is about.

Book came on time, which is the good part. Anything else ... not so hot. This book hardly explains anything. Doing all of the experiments felt nothing more than doing repetitive laboratory techniques over and over again. Didn't really learn anything ... sad.

This is a good organic textbook, but I think a book by other writers would be better.

This is my first semester organic chemistry course. Even though I have been using another book for laboratory "Organic Chemistry Lab [...] by Charles E., Jr. Bell", this book helped me to understand the concepts better (many times the instructor quized us on the reasoning behind an experiment which Bell does not mention).
Moreover, Bell's book is somewhat incomplete. For about 25% of the experiments that I performed, we used hand-outs because Bell's did not handle them correclty.
I think that "developing microscale techniques" section was really good to introduce you to the most important techniques that one must master (which Bell does not mention much either.) I think that this book is not as bad as the other reviewers think, at least, relatively not as bad as they might think.

This book was required for my organic chemistry labratory class. I found amazon had the best price for this book.