NMR Spectroscopy

It has been almost 2 years since I wrote the initial review. Since then, I have the opportunity to read the whole book a second time. My opinion of this book remains the same. If you really want to understand NMR, you cannot go wrong with this book.

Initially I wanted to write a review for this book after I finish the whole book. However, since the publication of this book, I have noticed that nobody has ever written a review. I have only finished approximately 400 pages but I want to let people to know that this is clearest exposition on modern nmr spectroscopy I have ever come across. I have read a number of nmr books. These include the following

J.D. Roberts “ABC of FT NMR”
T. Claridge “High Resolution NMR spectroscopy in organic chemistry”
J. Sanders ” Modern benchtop NMR spectroscopy”
H. Friebolin “Basic One- and Two-Dimenionsal NMR”

None of the above is as good as this book. The one that comes close to this is Friebolin’s book. However, it is not as detail and does not cover topics such as operator formalism and density matrix. This book also covers the basic theoretical principles and presented in a very lucid way. I enjoy reading this book tremendously.

This is the best all around NMR text I have come across. Jacobsen does a great job of explaining the vast array of topics in NMR ranging from the nuclear magnetism and pulse sequences to biological NMR. It is very well written, easy to read and follow, while still going into great amounts of detail. 

For those who do not enjoy heavy amounts of differential equations and linear algebra, then you will appreciate this book as there is just enough math to aid the written explanations, but not so much as to make your head spin. This book also has one of the best explanations/discussions on multi-dimensional techniques commonly used in organic and biological chemistry. 

There is one specific area where I find this book is somewhat lacking, the discussion on T1, T2 and NOE which is fairly rudimentary. It is more than sufficient for those new to the topic or working on small molecules, but does not offer much past that in my opinion. Also, if you are looking for a better understanding in solid state NMR, this is not the book for you. I would highly recommend this book for anyone wanting to learn more about NMR.

I have read several books about NMR analyzer and practice, and this book provides by far the most lucid description of essentially all aspects of modern NMR (polarization transfer, coherence selection, cross-relaxation, exchange phenomena, solvent suppression, pulsed field gradients, triple resonance methods, residual dipolar couplings, etcetera). The book begins with a simple vector model, progresses to a product operator description, and toward the end, introduces readers to the density matrix representation. In addition to providing a strong conceptual understanding of pulse sequences and sequence modules (e.g., INEPT, DPFGSE, COSY, NOESY, ROESY, TOCSY, HSQC, HMQC, HMBC), the book also describes practical considerations like hardware, data collection, and data processing. The final chapter of the book describes the application of NMR to structural biology.

 This chapter might have benefited from a description of modern approaches for probing the dynamics of biological systems (e.g., relaxation dispersion NMR), which are one of the primary strengths of NMR compared to diffraction or microscopy for studies of biological systems. I recommend this book for any NMR user that seeks a greater conceptual understanding of the behavior and manipulation of nuclear spin states (i.e., how their NMR experiments work at the level of the ensemble of nuclear spins), and as a foundation for reading more advanced texts like those by Slichter, Abragam, Ernst, or Levitt.