Book excerpt: To master Organic Chemistry, it is essential to master mechanism. This book uses a novel approach to help you better understand the mechanisms of 80 common organic reactions. Each one is color coded so that you can clearly see the changes that take place during the reaction. The electrons involved in the mechanism are color coded, as are the arrows originating from those electrons and the bonds or lone pairs formed by them in the intermediates and product. As a result, you can trace specific pairs of electrons through an entire transformation. The description of what each mechanistic arrow means is color coded correspondingly so that it is easy to match up the text with the relevant portion of a reaction diagram.