Organic Chemistry, 9th Edition by Francis Carey

Book Preface

Reading and Seeing

The central message of chemistry is that the properties of a substance come from its structure. What is less obvious, but very powerful, is that someone with training in chemistry can look at the structure of a substance and tell you a lot about its properties. Organic chemistry has always been, and continues to be, the branch of chemistry that best connects structure with properties.

The goal of this text, as it has been through eight previous editions, is to provide students with the conceptual tools to understand and apply the relationship between the structures of organic compounds and their properties. Both the organization of the text and the presentation of individual topics were designed with this objective in mind.

In planning this edition, we committed ourselves to emphasizing line formulas as the primary tool for communicating structural information. Among other features, they replace the act of reading and interpreting strings of letters with seeing structural relationships between molecules. In order to provide a smooth transition for students as they progress from the textual representations they’ve used in introductory chemistry, we gradually increase the proportion of bond-line formulas chapter by chapter until they eventually become the major mode of structural representation. Thus, we illustrate SN1 stereochemistry in Chapter 8 by the equation:

The teaching of organic chemistry has especially benefited as powerful modeling and graphics software have become routinely available. Computer-generated molecular models and electrostatic potential maps were integrated into the third edition of this text and their number has increased in each succeeding edition. Also seeing increasing use are molecular orbital theory and the role of orbital interactions in chemical reactivity. These, too, have been adapted to enhance their value as teaching tools as illustrated in Figure 10.2 showing the π-molecular orbitals of allylic carbocations, radicals, and anions.