Organic Chemistry

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.

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 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 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.