John McMurry's best-selling text presents organic chemistry in a new edition that is up-to-date, beautifully written, visually striking, and pedagogically sound. Described by many of its users as ''an eminently teachable text'' McMurry sets the standard in the field. The writing style has received almost universal acclaim from its users. McMurry introduces new concepts only as needed and immediately illustrates them with concrete examples. And wherever possible, he ties material together with brief reviews, overviews, and reaction summaries. The result is a text that helps students mentally organize the material; a text that helps them understand concepts (not just memorize facts); and a text that helps them make sense of the voluminous amount of material they encounter in the study of organic chemistry...McMurry uses a simple but important polar reaction--the addition of HBr to an alkene--as the lead-off reaction to illustrate the general principles of organic reactions. Users of former editions found this an excellent choice because of its relative simplicity (no prior knowledge of chirality or kinetics is required), and its importance as a polar reaction on a common functional group that offers students the key to understanding hundreds of thousands of ionic reactions. By selecting this particular model, McMurry is able to offer an unusually early presentation of organic reactions. Read Less