The Organic Chemistry textbook from Wiley first came out in 1976, making it perhaps the longest running, actively updated book used by undergraduates throughout the world.
Professor Scott Snyder joined the author team for the 11th edition over a decade ago and has since contributed to both the 12th edition and the 13th edition that was published this month. In conjunction with fellow co-authors Graham Solomons (University of South Florida) and Craig Fryhle (Pacific Lutheran University), he modernized and streamlined the content, added many examples of how organic chemistry can impact daily life, and used his experience in natural products synthesis to provide new and compelling problems for student engagement.
As noted by the publishers website, this text “prepares students for success in the classroom and beyond. By emphasizing the relationship between structure and reactivity. To accomplish this, the content is organized in a way that combines the most useful features of a functional group approach with one largely based on reaction mechanisms. The authors’ philosophy is to emphasize mechanisms and their common aspects as often as possible, and at the same time use the unifying features of functional groups as the basis for most sections. The structural aspects show students what organic chemistry is. Mechanistic aspects show students how it works. The authors show students what organic chemistry does in living systems and the physical world around us.”
In speaking about his work on the book, Snyder noted that “When I first joined the author team, I was excited to be part of a text that had been on the market since 1976. Indeed, that longevity, in my mind, reflected the power of its pedagogy, focused on a mechanism and functional group-based approach that had already benefited hundreds of thousands of students over decades. My hope has been to excite new students and assist their classroom instructors in effectively teaching the subject through my expertise as a research active scientist in the area of natural products synthesis, further modernizing the book’s tried and true recipe. Thus far, that has meant finding ways to incorporate historic and modern examples of the principles and reactions that serve as its main offerings to show students the relevance of what they are learning in their daily lives as well as developing new sections, problems, and non-textual content such as videos to enhance student learning."
In addition to this book, Professor Snyder has also authored several other books, including the graduate text Classics in Total Synthesis II (with K. C. Nicolaou, 2003, Wiley-VCH) and Teach Better, Save Time, and Have More Fun: A Guide to Teaching and Mentoring in Science (with Penny Beuning and Dave Besson, 2014, Research Corporation for Science Advancement). He has also edited a volume of the Thieme Science of Synthesis Reference Library Series in 2015 entitled Applications of Domino Transformations in Organic Synthesis.