Welcome to "The Chemist's Electronic Book of Orbitals"

For many years, Bill Jorgensen and Lional Salem's Organic Chemist's Book of Orbitals was the standard work on qualitative MO-theory in Erlangen. It provided the basic principles as well as MO-plots of exactly the orbitals that we needed to understand the effects that we were investigating. However, 25 years after its publication, the Organic Chemist's Book of Orbitals is essentially unknown to the current generation of chemistry students, although qualitative MO-theory has become a standard tool. This and the new technical possibilities made possible by the development of web browsers, VRML-viewers etc. suggested that the time is right to attempt a more modern version, this time called The Chemist's Electronic Book of Orbitals. The resulting "book" is a tribute to its predecessor and we hope that it will play a similar role as vanguard for a new generation of chemistry publications in this area. The written text can be read alone, but is intended to be used in conjunction with the demonstrations and VRML-objects on the CD. The orbital plots can be rotated, displayed and printed as desired. We have designed The Chemist's Electronic Book of Orbitals to be accessed from a standard web-browser with VRML viewer and JAVA in order to avoid the need for extra software on the CD and to make it accessible from as many hardware platforms as possible.

Many people have contributed to the success of this project. We especially thank Peter Enders at Springer for unflagging support. The entire Clark-group has devoted many coffee breaks to discussing possibilities and improvements and Jens Schamberger and Peter Gedeck developed the graphics program used to plot the MOs. Peter Comba provided us with a list of the most important ligands for transition metal complexes, but any omissions are ours, not his. It is a pleasure to thank the Deutscher Forschungsnetz-Verein (DFN) and especially Ralf Paffrath. This book was conceived as part of a DFN-financed teleteaching project and has benefitted from many stimulating discussions within this project. Above all, however, we thank Bill Jorgensen and Lionel Salem for the "one and only original" and hope that they will find our "son of Jorgensen and Salem" worthy of its predecessor.

Tim Clark and Rainer Koch

Erlangen, Oldenburg, January 1999