Organic Chemistry - Some Basic Principles and Techniques

This is the chapter that decides how the rest of organic chemistry goes for you. Everything in Class 12 organic sits on top of it: how to name a compound, how to draw it, how to spot the functional group, and above all how to work out where the electrons are and where they will move. The chapter starts with carbon and why its four bonds and its habit of joining to itself produce millions of compounds. Then come the three ways of writing a structure, the classification into families, and IUPAC nomenclature, which is a set of rules you can apply mechanically once you have them straight. The middle of the chapter is isomerism, and then the part that really matters: bond fission, the intermediates it produces, and the four electronic effects, inductive, electromeric, resonance and hyperconjugation, that between them explain almost every stability and reactivity order you will ever be asked to justify. The last third is laboratory work, purifying a compound and finding out what is in it. It is a long chapter and a high-scoring one. Nomenclature and stability orders are near-certain marks in both JEE and NEET, and the electronic effects are what let you reason your way through a reaction you have never seen.