Illustrated Glossary of Organic Chemistry

http://www.chem.ucla.edu/~harding/IGOC/C/common_name.html

by mahami • 5 years ago

59 13 5 years ago

chem.ucla.edu

greenyoda• 5 years ago

Home page of this glossary: http://www.chem.ucla.edu/~harding/IGOC/IGOC.html

fastssd• 5 years ago

Thanks, this is something I needed but was too lazy to search for. Perfect for quick lookups

pomian• 5 years ago

This is cool. Like those huge chemistry reference books that we had on our desks, that weighed about 20lbs! Just more portable.

trutannus2• 5 years ago

One of my favorite books of all time is Organic Chemistry by Wade et al. Sadly, that book is a monster of a book.

nknealk• 5 years ago

Dr. Hardinger at UCLA teaches the intro organic chemistry courses for essentially anyone graduating in science. His lectures regularly exceeded enrollment of 1000 people per quarter when I was there in 2009.

Dr. Hardinger also wrote his own text books. He’d charge $35ish for them through the university publisher instead of making us buy much more expensive professionally published text books. I personally thought they were well written and his problem sets and worked explanations were clear and concise. All in all a great professor.

supernova87a2• 5 years ago

I would love if there were an illustration of how to understand organic chemistry as not a collection of endless "rules" that yet have annoying exceptions, and tables and tables of pKas that mean you just have to remember that something does what it does, "because".

jamesash• 5 years ago

I have been working on this site for 11 years, has 400 free articles on intro organic chemistry: https://www.masterorganicchemistry.com Probably the most fun thing I ever did was breaking down the mechanisms of 25-30 reactions into individual steps, and then assigning a musical note to each step. Playing the sequence of notes helps you recognize the patterns behind the reactions. One pattern in particular (protonation-carbonyl addition-deprotonation-protonation-elimination-deprotonation, or PADPED) covers the mechanism of at least 8 superficially different reactions. Another great organic chemistry resource: https://organicchemistrydata.org/hansreich/resources/pka/#pk...

supernova87a2• 5 years ago

Thank you! I will have a look.

HPsquared• 5 years ago

That's the problem with chemistry though, a lot of it is "just because". We only have certain numbers to work with. The Lego set of organic chemistry only contains so many pieces.

cogburnd02• 5 years ago

Wait there's a LEGO SET!?!?

Oh, wait, you probably meant that as a metaphor, didn't you?

bsedlm• 5 years ago

I wish somebody would analyze all these symbols from the perspective of formal languages.

trutannus2• 5 years ago

Resources like this back up my idea that we teach organic chemistry wrong. It always escaped me why rote memorization is how the subject is taught, when it's actually much better suited to the 'learn by doing' approach. If you have references like this, actually doing the work of organic chemistry is much more educational!

For example: rather than trying to force people to memorize solvent-reaction combinations, have them actually try the wrong combinations and show them physically what happens. Seeing the reaction fail, then getting into why that is would likely stick more than just seeing a red X mark beside the wrong selection on paper. Always found doing the lab course first made the subject just make sense.

The "you won't always have a reference" argument is nonsense. Am I going to be teleported back in time and have to recreate modern medicine?

Illustrated Glossary of Organic Chemistry

Related Stories