An amazing and incisive description of retrosynthetic techniques, written at the advanced undergraduate level.



My criticisms would be:



(1) Rather too terse at some points; a few more words would make it flow more smoothly;

(2) As the book progresses, there are increasing references to "Strategy and Control", and more annoyingly, the workbook; the text is not entirely self contained, and I should not have to purchase the workbook for simple clarification;

(3) The index is really poor. This is the book's principal failing, and makes hunting around for cross references much harder than it should be.



Nevertheless, this is a wonderful work on an exciting and important area of organic chemistry, and I heartily recommend it.