The book is very new, but it took a long while for it to arrive.
After I ordered this book, it was delivered after two weeks. This is a little bit too long.

As a previous review suggested, this book fell short of expectations. There are in fact quite a few errors (i.e. pentavalent carbons, etc.); such errors are especially prevalent in the problem section of the book. Moreover, the book does contain many outdated problems.

Although the organization of the book isn't horrible, it isn't a very readable text, mainly due to the detail they go into in explanations of seemingly irrelevant things. In other words, this book is not very conducive to skimming, or good at all for review; especially when it comes to the carbon acid section. Rather than simply stating general trends of carbon acids, they go into detail about the different methods for measuring the pKas of carbon acids, and the different advantages and disadvantages to such methods. While this may be of interest to some people, it simply makes the section much less readable, perhaps a short summary at the end of each section summarizing general concepts would help alleviate this error. So rather than having to sift through 20 pages of mostly worthless crap to find one simple concept, it would be briefly outlined in the end (or beginning) of a section, or chapter.

Perhaps the thing that annoys me most about this book, however, is the absolutely horrible way in which structures are presented in the book. Rather than sticking to simple Line-bond structures (or carbon skeletons, whatever you know them as), molecules are presented as an obnoxious mixture of both. In some cases (i.e. ylides, and such) actually labling carbons and hydrogen atoms can be useful. However, when you get to the problem section and see something to the effect of - CH2=C(CH2)3CH2CHO - rather than a simple line-bond structure, it becomes obnoxious very quickly. Moreover, in larger molecules, they tend to show cycles in line-bond format, and substituents as shown above. I know that being able to convert back and forth between the structures is important in organic chemistry, but if you are going on to advanced organic and you can't convert between the two, then I think you have bigger issues.
The main problem with this way of showing molecules is that it it makes it much more annoying while solving the problems (which can bw annoying enough with all the errors), especially while doing either mechanisms or synthesis problems, you have to draw out the line-bond structure anyways in order to be able to clearly visualize larger molecules, so showing molecules the way they do, in almost every case (with a few exceptions) is completely idiotic. Furthermore, the way they represent molecules in the text makes it much more prone to typesetting errors (i.e. pentavalent carbons, and the like). But who knows, maybe they are working in errors on purpose so they can revise is to bring out another edition.

In my opinion, in order for this book to be suitable for actually studying and learning adv. organic chemistry, this book needs a massive overhaul. Until them, reading this book to learn chemistry is about as effective as reading an English dictionary in other to learn English.

I ordered the book one week before the class starded and it arrived on the day before class. The book is in excellent condition.

This review is specifically meant to refer to the latest edition (5th ed.) of this book. The earlier editions were quite good, but the 5th edition completely misses the mark. Ordinarily, one would think that a book such as this would get better and better with each new edition. Not so with this book. For some reason, the 5th edition is loaded with mistakes.....many of these appear to be typesetting errors (e.g., atoms in the wrong place, pentavalent carbons, nonsense intermediates within reaction pathways, etc.). It is terribly disappointing. I do not know what happened at the publisher this time, but, in good conscience, they really should not have released this book the way it is. It does not appear to have been the authors' fault, but rather it was likely the fault of Springer (the publisher). This looks like an example of the mindless side of capitalism....large publishing companies who have already taken over much of their competition also have ridiculous deadlines to meet quarterly earnings goals, so they rush through the publication process and end up turning out garbage. The only way that these companies ultimately avoid getting into a heap of trouble with the FTC or other consumer advocate agencies is by issuing online addendums filled with corrections to the myriad of errors. Ask yourselves, is that why you want to buy a new book..... so that you have to download a 50-page corrections addendum to fix all of the errors that the publisher missed or opted not to correct in the first place? This sort of thing is happening more and more these days in the publishing industry, even with software. And the larger and larger these publishing companies become, the more we see it. I recommend that you DO NOT BUY the 5th edition of this book; it should have been recalled by the publisher, and everyone who bought it should have received a refund. However, if you really want to buy Carey and Sundberg's book, then buy the 4th edition used; you will be much happier. Apparently, Springer scaled back on qualified staff and/or hired a bunch of publishing flunkies sometime between the release of the 4th and 5th editions of this book.

This is probably the most comprehensive text book available for Organic Chemistry, Develops largely on the Part A of the book. So for a complete understanding you need to possess the Part A of the book. Largely covers the topic of Synthesis and Reactions which is an important part of the Graduate education in Organic Chemistry. Earlier editions of the book cover the same material and are almost as good as this one but each topic in this edition builds up with a different approach of Computational and Theoretical Chemistry.
The references provided in each chapter ensure the complete and total understanding of the subject and help in the student in research.
Overall a great book for the Graduate student in Organic Chemistry.

many thanks for your that effort , the book is good and come to me so fast

This book is not for introductory organic students. It is a condensed review with some explanation for a huge number of synthetically useful organic reactions. It explains exactly what it needs to, with diagrams when necessary. This book has been extremely useful in my graduate level organic classes.

This fourth edition has no big difference with the new fifth release. However, the price is only half. That is a good purchase for me.

this is the textbook in chemistry dept. It is good but will be better if it have more content in organometal stuff.

Both A and B part are very good reference book for organic chemistry graduate student. It is worth to have one if you want to open your career in organic chemistry