[Mitch]

For Undergraduate Students

 
Title: Organic Chemistry
Author: Nick Greeves
Description: The Clayden book is my favorite.  It's maybe a little advanced for someone encountering organic chem for the first time, but it's awesome nonetheless.--movie

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For Undergraduate Students

 
Title: Organic Chemistry
Author: Robert T. Morrison
Description: I been using this book since my GCE A levels. It has proved very useful when I was studying for my STEP paper. Even now at university, this book explains chemistry concept in few paragraphs so clearly that my lecturer takes an hour to teach. The concepts are well-introduced and explained step by step. It doesnt presume alot of pre-knowledge, but it builds up its depth chronologically from the 1st chapter.--geodome

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For Undergraduate Students

 
Title: Organic Chemistry
Author: K. Peter C. Vollhardt, Neil Eric Schore
Description: A great introduction into the field of Organic Chemistry. This is the undergraduate textbook for Organic Chemistry used at Berkeley.--Mitch

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For Graduate Students and Advanced Undergraduate Students


Title: Advanced Organic Chemistry, Fourth Edition - Part A
Author: Francis A. Carey
Description: Carey and Sundberg has been the standard first-year grad. student text for a long time.  Personally, I don't like it that much.  There is a lot of good information, but I found the writing really bland and inaccessible.  I pretty much only use C&S to look up some raw data, not for explanation of concepts.  I might be in the minority on that though.--movies

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For Graduate Students and Advanced Undergraduate Students


Title: Advanced Organic Chemistry, Fourth Edition - Part B
Author: Richard J. Sundberg
Description: Carey and Sundberg has been the standard first-year grad. student text for a long time.  Personally, I don't like it that much.  There is a lot of good information, but I found the writing really bland and inaccessible.  I pretty much only use C&S to look up some raw data, not for explanation of concepts.  I might be in the minority on that though.--movies

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For Graduate Students


Title: March's Advanced Organic Chemistry
Author: Michael B. Smith, Jerry March
Description: For those serious about learning organic chemistry, this will touch on all advanced topics in the field.--Mitch

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For Graduate Students

Title: Modern organic synthesis
Author: Dale L Boger
Description: The Boger book (called Modern Organic Synthesis: Lecture Notes is kind of the same way, tons of information and references to primary literature, but no text explaining any of the concepts.  It really is just Boger's lecture notes.  I had to get this book for a class and so we covered a lot of the info in lecture.  Without the lecture it would be very, very difficult to learn from this book.  Definitely not a book for beginners, but if you have a good base in organic chem, it's a nice addition.  Also, it doesn't have an index (just a table of contents), so you have to look through it enough to know what is in there and where.  Finally, you have to buy this book directly from Scripps, and when I bought mine they didn't accept credit cards.  So I had to mail a check, wait for them to cash it, and then wait for the book to be shipped.  It took about three weeks in all.  That said, I use the book a lot.--movies

[Mitch]

updated

[cbee]

OK, I need to add my two cents. Vogel's Textbook of Practical Organic Chemistry.  It contains the basics on how to do many practical organic techniques as well as representitive experiments.  All the experiments are fairly basic, but I use the thing a suprising amount.  Somtimes you just want a quick prep for how to hydrolyse a nitrile to an acid/ ester, or how to set up a liquid ammoina reaction.  The section on derivatives may be a little out of touch (in fact most of the structure determination section is pretty old school) but it is still an invaluble source for a lot of basic chemistry.  Or am I just a hopless romantic?




Cisco

[The Good Doctor]

Indeed nice books!

What i also recommend for students is Streitweisers' " Organic Chemistry".
If u are more interested in design, or optimization to bioactive Pharma compounds and Medicinal Chemistry for industry then an absolute topper is "The Practise of Medicinal Chemistry" by Camille Wermuth (Elsevier).

[Blueshawk]

I found that    

Organic Chemistry 4th Ed  by  Bruice to be a good resource for
introductery O.chem.

Though one problem is the use of common names for cpds in the homework section of the book.

There is a complete study guide as well with answer to almost all the questions.

EDIT: spellcheck on chemistry

[Jiro]

ya i hear there are some mistakes in the solutions manual but from my skim the solutions look good and explained well in the Organic Chemistry 4th Ed  by  Bruice text

[galex]

I really like they have such a good rating on Amazon. Sadly i do not know if i will have the chance to read any of it...in the near future.

[Donaldson Tan]

For Graduate Students


Title: March's Advanced Organic Chemistry
Author: Michael B. Smith, Jerry March
Description: For those serious about learning organic chemistry, this will touch on all advanced topics in the field.--Mitch

LOL. That is the recommended organic chemistry textbook for 2nd year (undergraduate) organic synthesis here at my college. I gotta get that book next year (for my organic synthesis modules)

[Mitch]

I would pitty anyone who had to learn organic synthesis from that book.

[movies]

I would pitty anyone who had to learn organic synthesis from that book.

Seriously.  That book is good if you know a lot of organic chem. already and you are just looking to find out different ways of doing things, but it's awful when it comes to working through concepts.  Most of the book is made up of broad statements in a single sentence with a reference at the end.  If you want to understand anything in there, you have to either already know what they are talking about or go and look up the paper.  So, good because there is a great breadth of info, crummy because none of it is explained in any depth.

[webguy54]

Are there any good books that help teach IR and/or NMR spectroscopy? I'm having so much trouble with both.    

[movies]

The classic one is "Spectrometric Identification of Organic Compounds" by Silverstein and Webster.  It's great for NMR, but I haven't used it much for IR.  It goes into a lot of detail on how to look at NMRs and talks about some of the higher level experiments (e.g. 2D NMR) and what they can tell you.

Another good one is "Structure Determination of Organic Compounds" by Pretsh, Buhlmann, and Affolter.  It doesn't have much theory of spectroscopy, but it has tons of reference data, such as where you would expect the ¹³C signals of an aromatic ring with a CF₃ substituent (i.e., trifluorotoluene) and what all the J_C-F coupling constants are.

Most sophomore organic textbooks will have a chapter on spectroscopy as well, but they don't usually go in to a much depth.

[Proileri]

What we use in my Polytech is McMurry's Introduction to Organic Chemistry. Seems decent to me, starts from the very basics.

Anyone else have experience with it?

[jeeken]

 
I wish i have enough time to read them all!

[jameelhasan]

  CAREY's book should be a good book but i have not compared it any others yet