Natural Science Forum / Chemistry / Organic Synthesis / October 2003

There are a huge number of books on connection and synthon
approaches.  You start at the end and unravel the molecule to
acceptable starting materials.  If you are good, you can look at the
gestalt and see higher order disconnections (e.g., multi-component
reactions like biomimetic assemblage of the atropine skeleton, the Ugi
reaction, domino Diels-Alder, zipping difarnesyl skeletons to
steroids, etc.).   Helicene assembly is clever.  Thomas Katz at
Columbia University assembling helicenes is cleverer.

Parallel assembly gives much better yields than serial assembly - and
if you screw up, all may not be lost back to the first starting
material.

http://www.uea.ac.uk/~c286/notes/retrosynthesis.htm
This was made for students. This text is helpful and not very complicated,
with many examples. You need two things to be able to do organic synthesis
well: knowledge and logical thinking.
Ivana.