Let’s get straight to the point: no one likes a textbook that looks like an encyclopedia, period. Those thick heavy hardcover textbooks may look nice on a bookshelf, but they do not appeal to students or instructors. When students must flip hundreds of pages back and forth to find hidden connections between scattered chapters, spend countless hours on lengthy chapters along with the supplemental reading materials, and become immersed in too many details without seeing the big picture, the overall learning experience becomes overwhelming, tedious, and disappointing. For more than a decade, we have been teaching organic chemistry and listening to our clients, i.e., students. After researching and testing many organic chemistry textbooks, we finally decided to develop our textbook to meet the needs of our students.

We want to keep things simple: we try to stitch closely related topics together and integrate them into a handful of “units” rather than spreading them across many chapters; we try to introduce key concepts and basic skills as early as possible; we encourage students to stay focused on reaction mechanisms rather than learning by rote; we limit the number of questions after each unit so that the homework assignment no longer looks like a mission impossible, and so on.

Nevertheless, this is just the first edition and we will continue to make improvements in the future. At this moment, we are proud of taking the first step in the new direction. We hope this textbook will benefit many students, enabling them to learn more efficiently and enjoy learning organic chemistry.