Prologue -- Biographical Sketch -- The Nineteenth Century: A Sequence of Accidental Discoveries -- Transition Metal Carbonyls: From Small Molecules to Giant Clusters -- A Scientific Revolution: The Discovery of the Sandwich Complexes -- One Deck More: The Chemical ''Big Mac'' -- The Binding of Ethene and Its Congeners: Prototypical Metal pi-Complexes -- Metal Carbenes and Carbynes: The Taming of ''Non-existing'' Molecules -- Metal Alkyls and Metal Aryls: The ''True'' Transition Organometallics -- Epilogue -- Index
Summary
Since the discovery of ferrocene and the sandwich-type complexes, the development of organometallic chemistry took its course like an avalanche and became one of the scientific success stories of the second half of the twentieth century