Customer Reviews

Organic Chemistry

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

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.

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.

This is my favorite chemistry book. This book is different from others because it's conversational in tone and easy to read. If more chemists wrote like this, there would be a lot fewer discouraged potential chemists out there. The electron diagrams lead to complete understanding of reactions so you don't need to memorize them. The problems are interesting puzzles. You will want to do more than the ones that are assigned just to find out what the answer is. The accompanying solution manual provides all the details needed to completely understand the answers. Chemistry can be beautiful and understandable when a book is written this well.

I took organic chemistry last year, and I am so glad that this book was used as our textbook. Anyone who studies one of the sciences knows all too well that not many textbooks out there are at all easy to understand. Loudon's book is very clearly written, and he succeeds very well in putting information into words. At the same time, the book is not "dumbed down," which I appreciated.

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 Hammet principle) are just plain incomplete. A good text for a simple course but no real weight here.

I bought this to update my library. So far, whenever I've turned to it I found what I wanted. It's hard to find a good comprehensive organic chem book without buying an intro and advanced book separately. So far, this has covered the bases. Who knows, maybe I'm not doing advanced enough work!!

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.

I have found this text to be well written and very helpful. Organic Chemistry is quite difficult in general, but this book takes you through everything in a clear and concise manner. Lots of problems to practice. It may also help to get the solutions guide which answers the problems setp-by-step and gives another perspective/sumary of the material.

I've read two organic chemistry books (McMurry and, this one, Loudon), and out of the two, this one is better.
Most of the chapters explain the concepts in detail, and they're quite easy to understand.
My professor once in a while tells the class to read the book because it does a good job of explaining things.
The examples or "study problems" help a lot too. When I don't have time to solve the problems and look up their solutions in the study guide, I just do the "study problems" and read the explanations for each problem.

Things that are awesome:
-Questions are in the text as you go, so it makes it harder to skip them, since sipping problems is a great way to get a bad grade.
-Examples of really interesting applications you've actually heard of (cancer treatments, medical imaging technologies, etc. ...), giving you the feeling you're doing something worthwhile when you study OChem.
-Seems uber-thorough to me.

Things that are less than awesome:
-So thorough that it sometimes becomes unnecessarily confusing.

To make it better:
-Loudon could give a brief summary and highlight of the concepts at the beginning of each section.

This is the only full-blown Orgo text book I have used so I can't compare it to the others out there, but since most of its readers are probably in my shoes I think my take could be helpful. Loudon's approach seems to be precisely the opposite of Klein's popular "Organic Chemistry as a Second Language" but they both have the same aim. Where Klein tries to distill things for the reader Loudon prefers to dissect in great (or perhaps excruciating) detail why something is the way it is. Loudon is not okay with students memorizing facts in order to spew them out on test day, he wants you to get it, and get it all the way down. Klein also wants you to see the "forest through the trees," but if Loudon has his way you will see the forest and know every damn tree in it too!

All in all I have enjoyed the text book's approach, but it is more of a secondary resource next to my own homogenation of youtube videos(freelanceteacher is great)and Klein's book. After getting the highlights of a topic I go to Loudon, see how he has handled it and then answer the assigned problems. If I am introduced to a topic by Loudon I often end up too confused and frustrated to keep going, and find myself writing Amazon reviews instead of studying :). Word to the OChem proffs: please have the decency to let your students know which sections of a chapter they will be tested on at the beginning of the semester. I had to stop reading ahead of class because my proff ends up scoffing at the inclusion of the same sections it took me forever to wade through.