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Rating: 
Summary: Don't waste you time
Review: Comprehensive? Possibly, the book is large enough to brain small animals. Can you find anything in it? Probably not. The book is organized in some bizarre fashion that is hard to comprehend. Besides, in the age of computers, who needs it when you can search databases directly. Even for people without access to chemical databases, there are better references out there.
Rating: 
Summary: Agreed - a must have for the practicing organic chemist
Review: I agree that the bad reviews are probably predominantly from non-chemists. Larock's first edition has become an absolute standard reference on the desk of the practicing organic chemist, who is after lead references and an idea of how a given transformation has been done. I have seen his 2nd edition and it is much the same, only updated and expanded. The price is high, but typical for the field and quite justified. I am waiting til I can buy it with faculty startup funds, but in 6 months it will be on my desk!
Rating:
Summary: Agreed - a must have for the practicing organic chemist
Review: I agree that the bad reviews are probably predominantly from non-chemists. Larock's first edition has become an absolute standard reference on the desk of the practicing organic chemist, who is after lead references and an idea of how a given transformation has been done. I have seen his 2nd edition and it is much the same, only updated and expanded. The price is high, but typical for the field and quite justified. I am waiting til I can buy it with faculty startup funds, but in 6 months it will be on my desk!
Rating:
Summary: Ignore the non-chemists reviewing this book.
Review: I want to help others sort through the conflicting reviews of this book. As a PhD chemist, I can say unequivocally that this book is not for the non-professional, as I suspect the negative reviewers are. The indexing system is not intuitive, but makes sense once you've begun to use it. One of the reviewers complains that database searching is better than this book. This book is intended to help you find straightforward procedures for relatively straightforward reactions and allows you to look at the many things that have been tried to effect a given transformation. These are things that the databases can't help much with since these reactions have been done in the literature thousands of times, and any search will generate a huge mess of matches.
Rating:
Summary: Ignore the non-chemists reviewing this book.
Review: I want to help others sort through the conflicting reviews of this book. As a PhD chemist, I can say unequivocally that this book is not for the non-professional, as I suspect the negative reviewers are. The indexing system is not intuitive, but makes sense once you've begun to use it. One of the reviewers complains that database searching is better than this book. This book is intended to help you find straightforward procedures for relatively straightforward reactions and allows you to look at the many things that have been tried to effect a given transformation. These are things that the databases can't help much with since these reactions have been done in the literature thousands of times, and any search will generate a huge mess of matches.
Rating: 
Summary: Hoping Big but Disappointing
Review: The title "Comprehensive Orgainc Transformations" strikes me with much hope that all representative functional groups tranfer and reactions will be fully explained and included in one volume for easy reference. Well, not so quick.Cited references from this volume might be the only (+) that I will credit to the piece. The organization of the book is extremely perplexing and weird. It is not very easy to find a reaction that I desire. In fact, the details for transformation are disappointingly little. If you plan to get this book with the same expectation, you should turn to Jerry March's Advanced Organic Chemistry or the Beilstein Cross-Fire Organic Reaction and Compounds software. Any advanced texts on organic synthesis will give you more details. Oh, by the way, the price () is just stunningly high and ridiculous.
Rating:
Summary: Hoping Big but Disappointing
Review: The title "Comprehensive Orgainc Transformations" strikes me with much hope that all representative functional groups tranfer and reactions will be fully explained and included in one volume for easy reference. Well, not so quick. Cited references from this volume might be the only (+) that I will credit to the piece. The organization of the book is extremely perplexing and weird. It is not very easy to find a reaction that I desire. In fact, the details for transformation are disappointingly little. If you plan to get this book with the same expectation, you should turn to Jerry March's Advanced Organic Chemistry or the Beilstein Cross-Fire Organic Reaction and Compounds software. Any advanced texts on organic synthesis will give you more details. Oh, by the way, the price () is just stunningly high and ridiculous.
Rating:
Summary: An excellent resource for the organic chemist
Review: This book provides an excellent starting point for a literature search on a particular reaction. Unlike an electronic database, the references provided are generally just the most useful ones.
Rating:
Summary: An excellent resource for the organic chemist
Review: This is a very good book for looking up references on a great variety of transformations. This book is probably not as good a March's book, but complements it very well. Between these two books, you can probably find any reference you want.
Rating:
Summary: Not excellent, but very good
Review: This is a very good book for looking up references on a great variety of transformations. This book is probably not as good a March's book, but complements it very well. Between these two books, you can probably find any reference you want.
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