Product Description

With a reputation for outstanding scientific quality, Organic Chemistry by G. Marc Loudon is a textbook that students will actually want to read. This much-anticipated fourth edition continues its predecessors' popular and unique mechanistic approach within a functional group framework. Enhanced biological and biochemical material makes it ideal for chemistry majors as well as pre-medical and pre-pharmacy students taking a full-year, sophomore- level course. Loudon's excellent use of language and reader-friendly style transform organic chemistry into a logical, understandable, and exciting subject for students.
In use at undergraduate and graduate schools of all levels, this authoritative yet accessible volume is packed with effective analogies that enliven and clarify rigorous discussions of important concepts. For example, Loudon uses a flute player jumping between musical octaves to explain transitions between quantum levels. An engaging detective with combined characteristics from Sherlock Holmes and James Bond depicts resonance structures. Thanks to humorous characters like Flick Flaskflinger and Professor Havno Scentz, problem-solving becomes simultaneously challenging and entertaining. Varying from the routine to the complex, Loudon's problems are renowned for their originality, their range of difficulty levels, and their ability to teach students to understand and predict organic reactivity rather than just memorize facts. In addition, Loudon blends biological, environmental, and industrial applications of organic chemistry into the body of the text--rather than separating them as "special topics"--giving students an integrated sense of the subject in its real-life context.
Other Features
DT Uses a high-resolution 300 MHz spectra run specifically for this text in an easy-to-read format that makes splitting patterns very clear.
DT Includes new sections on transition-metal organometallic chemistry, reactions of pyridoxal phosphate, combinatorial synthesis, and drug design.
DT Emphasizes both Bronsted and Lewis acid-base chemistry and their associated curved-arrow notations.
DT Provides more than 1,500 excellent in-text problems that challenge students to think and analyze rather than just memorize.
DT Presents "boxed asides" with interesting historical vignettes and analogies that enrich the text.
DT Utilizes extensive cross-references between important concepts, thus saving students trips to the index.
DT Supplemented by a CD-ROM--"Dynamic Organic Chemistry"--containing original animations (Mac and Windows compatible).

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #414579 in Books
• Published on: 2001-12-27
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 1421 pages

Review
...I consider it one of the premier texts of this generation. --David Evans, Harvard University

Although each edition has represented a major advance in the presentation of new chemistry, they have all retained the lucid presentation and order of topics that attracted us to the first version... --Robert H. Grubbs, California Institute of Technology

The fifth edition of this text continues to refine the author's characteristically elegant, mechanism-based framework for introducing organic chemistry. Professor Loudon has inspired several generations of students with his clear and insightful presentation style. In no other text does the logic, power and sheer beauty of organic chemistry shine through so clearly. --Bruce Ganem, Cornell University

Review
"Very easy to understand. Eliminates confusing details and presents the material in plain English, which should catch students' attention."--Cosmas Obi Okoro, Tennessee State University

About the Author
G. Marc Loudon is at Purdue University.

Customer Reviews

BEST ORGANIC TEXT
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.

Good, but not good enough
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.

Stupendous
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.