Acknowledgments

This book exists because of the decades of teaching, writing, and problem-designing done by organic chemists before us.

The mechanism-first philosophy is not our invention. It is the approach of Jonathan Clayden, Nick Greeves, and Stuart Warren in Organic Chemistry (Oxford, 2012), and it is the skills-based framework developed by David Klein in Organic Chemistry (Wiley, multiple editions). Anyone who has read those books will recognize the debt this book owes them. We have tried to take their approach further — making the book free, integrating computational chemistry from Chapter 2 onward, weaving biology through every chapter rather than isolating it at the end, and treating spectroscopy as a continuous storyline rather than a terminal detour.

We also owe a great debt to John McMurry and the OpenStax team, whose free tenth edition of Organic Chemistry is a model of what a free textbook can be. This book is an alternative, not a replacement; students and instructors should use whichever serves them better, and many will benefit from reading both.

The worked examples draw on decades of problem sets developed by organic chemistry educators at universities too numerous to list. Where specific attribution is possible and the authors are still alive to thank, we have tried to do so in the further-reading sections of individual chapters.

The spectroscopy chapters lean heavily on data from the Spectral Database for Organic Compounds (SDBS) maintained by the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, Japan. We are grateful for their decades of work making real spectra freely available to chemistry students worldwide.

The retrosynthetic analysis chapters draw on the work of E. J. Corey and his students, whose Logic of Chemical Synthesis (Wiley, 1989) established retrosynthesis as a rigorous discipline.

The computational chemistry exercises were designed around the free software ecosystem — Avogadro, WebMO, and GAMESS — without which integrating computation into an undergraduate textbook would be impossible. We are grateful to the open-source chemistry community.

Any errors in this book are ours. The repository is on GitHub; please send corrections. We will acknowledge everyone who contributes.

— The Open Organic Chemistry Project