Organizing Organic Chemical Reactions?

thethinkingilia asks: "I am studying organic chemistry and I am seeking an intelligent way to organize all the reactions that I am responsible for memorizing. In general, one can think of this as a directed state machine where a functional group can be transformed to another functional group given set conditions. It must be robust enough to allow for tens of states, the possibility of connection between any of said states, and be able to display not only the states, but conditions for transition between these states. This could be accomplished with HTML hyperlinks, but it would be great to have an elegant flow chart-type solution. Please, help me bring some software sanity to the life sciences!"

Comments

Directed Graph Layout

[tfinniga]

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=directed+grap h+layout

Electrons

[Rick_T]

My (graduate level) organic professor told us that the only thing we needed to remember was that "electrons flow from the electron source to the electron sink".

By and large, he was right - and organic made a lot more sense than it did to me as an undergraduate. Undferatanding HOW the reactions worked was easier than memorization dozens of twisty little reaction types, all alike.

But if you're taking about sophomore level organic - come on, is there really THAT much stuff to memorize?

Re:Electrons

[Daedala]

Paul Scudder's Electron Flow in Organic Chemistry is the textbook you want. It's all about electrons going from source to sink.

(New, the book is overpriced. Even the author thinks so -- he was complaining back when they raised the price to $30, and now it's $50. So get it used and send him a nice email if it helps.)