Textbooks for first year organic chemistry at Bristol

This is the little brother of Clayden and has the answers to most of the end-of-chapter questions, with full working shown and lots of hints and tips thrown in. Many of the tutorial questions are taken straight from Clayden, so the answers can be taken straight from here too!

Always have a shot at doing the questions without help first, not because it's good to punish yourself, but because once you've seen the answer, you can never remember what it's like not to understand the problem, so you might forget which important things you haven't quite got your head round. Nevertheless, this book is great for detailed answers from the people who wrote the questions — especially useful if you run out of time in a tutorial or you don't understand the explanation.

This is primarily the graduate textbook, but there are many things I've found it useful for throughout my undergraduate study of chemistry.

March has some very simple, elegant descriptions outlining simple reactions and what is known of their mechanisms. It's not as colourful as Clayden but its concise style and logical order is really good.

Don't be scared by the huge number of references to the literature, they're useful if you want to know where the information came from and why we think it's true. This is something that Clayden doesn't really offer, except the odd mention of a famous researcher's name.