INTRODUCTION

Although most of the material is for study in the first year at university. Some of it belongs more appropriately to later years. Topics regarded as beyond the first year are clearly identified in the text by the superscript these will he covered in the second year and it is hoped that the book as a whole will be useful for quick reference and revision at all stages. Some pages are shorter than the standard length; these end inspective of their length, at natural breaks between topics.

The aim is to cover the characteristic properties of functiurral groups and the methods for interconnecting them in a concise systematic from. Only those properties and reactions regarded as general and important are included. A concise treatment requires a very economical presentation. The form adopted consists of schemes and diagrams, very short sentences and a note form of key phrases. Grammatical correctness and style have thus been subordinated to brevity and clarity. The central feature of the attempted systematic treatment is the simple reference system described a little later.

Aliphatic compounds are the main subject but cyclic compounds are often used to give a cleared illustration of a point. A few aromatic compounds are included to illustrate similar behavior of aliphatic and aromatic compounds arising from a common structural feature.

The rest of this chapter is concerned with the terms, representations and abbreviations which are to be used and with some fundamental topics involved in studying  the functional groups. Although it is not necessary for us to delve too deeply into organic theory a knowledge of the main features is required. Most students will already have some familiarity with the material; helpful accounts, pitched deliberately at an elementary level, are given in another Primer. In most department s the study of functional groups is preceded or accompanied by a course on theory and mechanism. However, this supplementation cannot be assumed and to embark on the groups without some knowledge of certain fundamentals would he difficult and unsatisfactory. To fill such a possible gap, brief accounts of the topies germane to group chemistry are given in the following sections. For fiction the

valence bond treatment is generally used, but simple molecular orbital theory is introduced at certain points.