Organic Chemistry: Structure and Function Eighth Edition

Very reasonable price and Looks like new. fast delivered.

Rented this book and got it brand new! It was required for my chemistry class. The material is difficult (which was expected, it’s organic chem), but the product itself was quality and stood up to countless nights of studying and being tossed around in my backpack. Would purchase again (and likely will—I have to repeat orgo in the fall!)

Well written. Easy to follow.

3.5 stars. When I started grad school, I TA'd (for Prof. Vollhardt's CHEM 3B) using the 5th edition of this book. Now, I am teaching from it as a new faculty member, so this is a book I'm more than familiar with.Pluses: The authors are excellent expositors who did a great job making everything crystal clear. The topics selected are truly core to the discipline of organic chemistry. The authors don't try to include their favorite "pet topics" (often topics related to their research). They make excellent use of electrostatic potential renderings in full color to show charge distribution (and good use of color in general). There are plenty of good practice problems, including both short-answer drill type problems, as well as "challenge" and "team" problems at an increased difficulty level. These problems somewhat makes up for the overall level of the textbook.Minuses: The examples tend to be on the simple side, and many mechanisms are left out. Indeed, I tend to view Vollhardt and Schore as the minimum base material of an undergraduate organic chemistry course. To reduce the number of reactions and the burden on students' memories, an admirable goal, they tend to introduce only one way of achieving a transformation, or one example of a class of mechanisms, to the exclusion of other useful examples. For example, the Hofmann rearrangement is taught, but the Schmidt, Curtius, and Beckmann are not. As a result, many interesting or even basic topics are omitted and students do not get as much practice as they should in doing critical thinking and problem solving. Oddly, even the acid-catalyzed aldol reaction is relegated to an end-of-chapter exercise. The conversion of an amide to nitrile via dehydration is also not mentioned. Enamine acylation is not mentioned, though alkylation is featured prominently, even though the alkylation is actually a very limited reaction confined to benzyl, allyl, or alpha-carbonyl electrophiles. I can go on....More worryingly, a couple of the mechanisms are wrong or at least oversimplified (e.g., cyclic bromonium and vinyl cations for alkyne addition instead of AdE3, 4-centered TS for NaBH4 reductions instead of open TS with H-bond activation). Incorrect structures include a trigonal R2CuLi with covalent Cu-Li bond instead of an essentially ionic "ate" complex (even with solvent molecules bound, the copper is pretty much digonal by x-ray). An aryl diazonium radical is shown with 9 electrons on N.The organization is weird -- the two chapters on ketone and ester enolates are separated (18 and 23), the chapter on various reactions of arenes is separated from the rest of the chapters on benzene derivatives (15, 16, and 22). Too much emphasis on IUPAC nomenclature (e.g., calling THF oxacyclopentane). Egregiously high price for a book that is basically the same as the 7th edition.Nevertheless, perhaps for sentimental reasons, I feel like it and the Carey textbook are the two best texts for a general-audience (non-honors) two-term introduction to organic chemistry sequence.Edit: I am taking off half of a star (rounded up) for the following statement on p. 815: "NaBH4 and LiAlH4 reduce carbonyl groups but not carbon-carbon double bonds. The reagents therefore convert unsaturated aldehydes and ketones into unsaturated alcohols." Any first year grad student will know that this is false. For NaBH4, e-EROS states: "NaBH4 usually tends to reduce a,b-unsaturated ketones in the 1,4-sense." It goes on to state that cyclohexenone gives a 59:41 mixture of 1,2 and 1,4 reduction. Indeed, this is why Luche and Stryker developed selective and mild conditions for 1,2 and 1,4 reduction, respectively. (LiAlH4 does indeed go 1,2 most of the time (although there are exceptions), and it is rather harsh and is often incompatible with other functional groups in the substrate.) I am shocked that Vollhardt and Schore, who are chemists with active research programs, would make an error like this. Generally speaking, I think it's better to leave some complications unsaid than to make a sweeping, but false, generalization.

Good condition

Awful formatting. Sometimes there are huge blanks on multiple pages. Wish it read like a pdf. I can’t highlight anything at all. All the chemical symbols are repeated, once as plain text and again as an image, presumably. The most frustrating thing to work with.

This book is God’s gift to earth. I haven’t read it yet but if it’s anything like the 7th edition.....WOW

It does not display like a pdf. The kindle version has messed up figures and lots of blacked out pages in random spots. The best method to buy the book is in a hardcopy format.