Organic Chemistry for the JEE
Pearson Education • ISBN: 978-93-325-7562-2 • Edition 2017
Quick Contents
About the Book
Organic Chemistry for the JEE (Main and Advanced), Volume II picks up where the first volume left off, shifting focus from foundational concepts to the functional groups that form the backbone of advanced organic chemistry. Written by I.S.S. Raju and published by Pearson, this edition carries the same teaching philosophy that made Volume I popular — explain the why before the what, and never assume the reader already gets it.
Raju spent 35 years teaching graduate and post-graduate students before retiring as principal. Since then, he has spent 15 years coaching JEE aspirants full-time. That double experience shapes every chapter. He knows where a bright student will stumble on a mechanism, and he writes toward that moment with care.
What Makes It Different
The book covers ten chapters across nearly a thousand pages. Halohydrocarbons open the volume with 132 pages of reaction mechanisms — nucleophilic substitution, elimination pathways, and the kind of comparative analysis that shows up repeatedly in competitive exams. Hydroxy compounds, ethers, and phenols get the longest treatment at 230 pages, which makes sense given how central these functional groups are to everything that follows.
Carbonyl compounds take 160 pages, walking through addition and condensation reactions with the sort of step-by-step logic that turns a confusing mechanism into something almost intuitive. Carboxylic acids and their derivatives receive dedicated chapters, each building on the last so that by the time you reach acid derivatives, the reactivity patterns feel familiar rather than forced.
The nitrogen-containing compounds chapter deserves special mention. Amines, diazonium salts, and isocyanides are notoriously tricky for students. Raju handles them with the patience of someone who has watched thousands of students get them wrong on practice tests. He isolates each reaction type, explains the driving force behind it, and only then asks you to combine them.
Carbohydrates, amino acids, proteins, and polymers round out the theoretical chapters. These sections often get short shrift in standard textbooks — treated as memorization-heavy afterthoughts. Here, they receive proper attention with structural clarity and biological context that makes the material stick. The final chapter on practical organic chemistry covers qualitative analysis, a section that maps directly to JEE practical-oriented questions.
What separates this volume from its competitors is the problem-solving architecture. Every chapter includes solved examples that mirror actual exam patterns, followed by practice sets graded from basic recall to multi-concept synthesis. Raju does not just teach you what happens in a reaction. He trains you to predict what happens next — and that predictive instinct is exactly what the hardest questions on NEET and JEE Advanced reward.
A caveat. The book is dense. Students who rush through chapters without working the practice problems will miss the point. The real value lives in the exercises, not the theory alone. Pair it with Volume I, and you have a complete organic chemistry curriculum for serious exam preparation.
Chapter Index
| Chapter | Title | Pages |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Halogen Derivatives of Hydrocarbons (Halohydrocarbons) | 1.1 – 1.132 |
| 2 | Hydroxy Compounds, Ethers and Phenols | 2.1 – 2.230 |
| 3 | Carbonyl Compounds | 3.1 – 3.160 |
| 4 | Carboxylic Acids | 4.1 – 4.88 |
| 5 | Acid Derivatives | 5.1 – 5.80 |
| 6 | Compounds Containing Nitrogen | 6.1 – 6.134 |
| 7 | Carbohydrates | 7.1 – 7.72 |
| 8 | Amino Acids and Proteins | 8.1 – 8.32 |
| 9 | Polymers | 9.1 – 9.40 |
| 10 | Practical Organic Chemistry | 10.1 – 10.28 |
Who Should Read This
The book serves a broad range of aspirants. Whether you are tackling medical entrance or engineering, the functional group chemistry in these pages covers the core syllabus shared across all of them.