Reddit reviews Pushing Electrons: A Guide for Students of Organic Chemistry, 3rd

Highly recommend this workbook: http://www.amazon.com/Pushing-Electrons-Students-Organic-Chemistry/dp/0030206936

I started going through it a little before class started (it was actually one of the required texts). Get your head around drawing structures and working mechanisms, and you'll be in great shape.

Trying buying it and supporting the author http://www.amazon.com/Pushing-Electrons-Students-Organic-Chemistry/dp/0030206936

Strongly suggest this study guide Honestly this really helped me get through my year of O Chem, especially the last quarter when I was starting to get rusty and needed a review for a comprehensive test.

Here is the best book for learning the basics of reaction mechanisms: Pushing Electrons

This

http://www.amazon.com/Organic-Chem-Lab-Survival-Manual/dp/0470494379/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1322973072&sr=1-1

and this

http://www.amazon.com/Pushing-Electrons-Students-Organic-Chemistry/dp/0030206936/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1322973131&sr=1-1

to supplement Morrison & Boyd or Brown, Foote, & Iverson.

I just finished second semester O-Chem and my prof told me that I was one of her top students and that she expects me to ask her for a grad school letter. The key thing to Organic as a class is to keep up with the work. Don't procrastinate at all if you can help it. It is really the sort of course where you would not go wrong putting at least an hour a day of work in every single day whether that work be reading the chapter, doing problems, or doing a study group with friends.

So the real answer is consistently work on the material more or less all the time.

It really is not the hardest class I've ever taken nor the most deeply involved. It is a survey course with all the weaknesses that implies. There will be places where you would love to go into more depth, but can't because there is not enough time. It's simply a lot of information that you have to internalize in a small amount of time, not some fantastically difficult concepts that you have to break apart and derive every aspect of to see how people arrived at it.

Things that I have found helpful as review material and just being able to use an alternate source for the same stuff that is in the Solomons book?

• Pushing Electrons
  
• Organic Chemistry as a Second Language
  
• Khan Academy Organic videos
  
• Open Courseware notes from all over
  
  and of course once you are in the second semester or over the summer and you need to take the ACS organic exam as your final it is useful to work through the problems in the ACS exam prep book that they put out. What you learn in class should really go beyond the scope of that material, but the more you practice the better you'll feel about it.

For grad school in pharmacology, you really don't need MO theory. In med chem, only if you are doing theoretical calculations. Klein's organic text or his books mentioned u/rightbackatcha/ are good with arrow-pushing, as is Week's book on the subject. https://www.amazon.com/Pushing-Electrons-Students-Organic-Chemistry/dp/0030206936