Electron Deficient Inorganic and Organic Compounds

This work provides an introduction to electron deficient inorganic and organic compounds, which form a rapidly growing and important family of substances in which bonding electrons are in short supply. Their study has contributed much to chemistry, and this is reflected in this exciting new text. It outlines the experimental and spectroscopic methods by which they have been characterized, surveys the structural patterns to which they conform and discusses the relative merits of simple localized bond and molecular orbital treatments of their bonding, with liberal use of diagrams and limited recourse to the Greek alphabet. The subject matter crosses the conventional borderlines between inorganic, organic, theoretical and physical chemistry, and therefore should be of interest to all undergraduates and graduates in those fields.