Recently, I reviewed Maitland Jones's Organic Chemistry for this Journal (J. Chem. Educ. 1998, 75, 291). In that review, I commented that "[a] useful addition would be the inclusion of a CD-ROM containing animations of the orbital interactions." I am pleased to report that Jones now comes with a copy of the Organic Reaction Animations CD by Fleming, Savage, and Hart, which contains animations of organic reactions discussed in the text.

The CD is an excellent accompaniment to Organic Chemistry. The fifty animations are accessed through a table of contents that is cross-referenced to page numbers in the text, making it easy to find the reaction of interest quickly. The animations themselves are clear and can be viewed in a ball-and-stick, space-filling, HOMO, or LUMO mode. It is even possible to switch between viewing modes in the midst of an animation. The animations can be put on a slow-motion setting to permit better visualization and are accompanied by an energy diagram, making it easy to identify transition states and intermediates. Electron flow is apparent in the HOMO and LUMO modes, allowing the student to link curved arrows and orbital interactions.

The window is clean and uncluttered, presenting the user with a very intuitive interface. All controls are clearly marked, and the animations are large enough to see easily. A separate window describing the reaction is accessed by a button at the bottom of the window. The animations are Quicktime movies of calculations performed with Wavefunction's Spartan program, and a Quicktime installer is included for those who do not have this piece of software.

Of course, I must grouse a little bit. Having seen this very impressive CD, I'm ready for the next generation of animations--wouldn't a fully interactive 3-D approach, which would allow the user to rotate the molecules, be even better? I found myself trying to peer around the back of molecules to see what they looked like from another angle!

This is a Mac/Win dual-platform CD. It installed and ran flawlessly on both a PowerMac 4400/200 running Mac OS 8.6 and a Micron Millennia MXE running Windows 95, although the images appeared to be sharper on the Mac. The animations are large enough that they can easily be seen upon projection, even from the last row of a 112-student lecture hall.

Fleming, Savage, and Hart have assembled an excellent accompaniment to Jones's Organic Chemistry. It is a major upgrade to an already impressive organic textbook.