[contra]

Hey everyone,

I know there is already a sticky regarding organic literature, and a few random posts touching on the subject, but I'm still torn between these two books on advanced organic; even after reading the forum posts and reviews on amazon.

Does anyone have any opinions about the two, pro's/con's? I hear a lot of good things about both (but I'm already leaning toward March's work).

Thanks a bunch

[Honclbrif]

I've got the 6th edition of March's and the info is good and well explained, but quite frankly, it is terribly edited. Footnotes which for "clarification" send you to pages that are unrelated to the topic, or things that are referenced as "pg(dollar signs*)"

*It displays three dollar signs. When I tried to print that here, it pasted something weird.

[Vidya]

Carey is the book which makes it easy to understand simple concepts .March is the book full of all kind of informations  and is good when you are doing high advance level organic chemistry .It can give you information for all types of mechanisms but slightly tough in explanations .

[nox]

^You found Carey made it easy to understand concepts? I hated Carey with a passion precisely because it was so dry and dense. I felt it was written more like a technical manual than a textbook.

[zeldajae]

I try to remind people when picking the right book, they should atleast read couple of intro pages to see if they are able to understand the material well in their way before taking out your wallet based on the reviews for the book. Because EVERYONE has different taste on how they would like to learn the material and EACH textbooks are different.

Personally, I am reading the Dummies, Carey, and my course textbook by LG Wade.

I prefer Carey over all the O-chem books I have, my taste of learning. 

[Dan]

Get both second hand

[movies]

They both have their place.  Carey has more complete discussions of concepts, but I agree with some others above that it is awful to read straight through.  March, on the other hand, is more like a collection of one-sentence snippets of chemistry.  It is easy to be misled into thinking that two methods of achieving a transformation are equally important, whereas in reality one is much more prevalent in practice.  March might give each of these two methods a single sentence and a reference.  March does have an incredible breadth of information though, so I actually use it quite a bit more often than Carey now.

[fledarmus]

March is very useful for pointing you to the primary literature. It is more a reference book than a textbook. The discussion of concepts is sketchy.

Carey is more thorough in its discussion of concepts and not as thoroughly footnoted.

Carey for me is probably the easier to learn from, but March is the one I keep on my shelf for when I need a review.

[Åke]

They can both come handy when there is a need to look something up, but I think both are kind of a boring read, especially Carey. I think Clayden, Greeves, Warren & Wothers: Organic Chemistry is a great book to start with and to get a solid ground to stand on, from then on it's mostly SciFinder and papers.

// Vedran