Organic Chemistry 2nd Edition (Oxford)

You can tell from the title that this book tells you about organic chemistry. But it tells you more than that: it tells you how we know about organic chemistry. It tells you facts, but it also teaches you how to fi nd facts out. It tells you about reactions, and teaches you how to predict which reactions will work; it tells you about molecules, and it teaches you how to work out ways of making them. We said ‘it tells’ in that last paragraph. Maybe we should have said ‘we tell’ because we want to speak to you through our words so that you can see how we think about organic chemistry and to encourage you to develop your own ideas. We expect you to notice that three people have written this book, and that they don’t all think or write in the same way. That is as it should be. Organic chemistry is too big and important a subject to be restricted by dogmatic rules. Different chemists think in different ways about many aspects of organic chemistry and in many cases it is not yet, and may never be, possible to be sure who is right. In many cases it doesn’t matter anyway. We may refer to the history of chemistry from time to time but we are usually going to tell you about organic chemistry as it is now. We will develop the ideas slowly, from simple and fundamental ones using small molecules to complex ideas and large molecules. We promise one thing. We are not going to pull the wool over your eyes by making things artifi cially simple and avoiding the awkward questions. We aim to be honest and share both our delight in good complete explanations and our puzzlement at inadequate ones.