Introduction

Abstract

We adopt the usual convention that an organometallic compound is a compound which contains one or more carbon-metal bonds. This is a less rigid definition than it appears, since we take a rather broad view of the term metal. While many elements can be classified very easily as metallic or non-metallic, others such as germanium or antimony are borderline and sometimes referred to as metalloids. We are including the chemistry of these elements and, when the compounds are sufficiently interesting, the net is extended even more widely to include, for example, such essentially non-metallic elements as boron and silicon. Despite their importance as starting materials, we are omitting any specific discussion of binary metal carbonyls since there is usually ample treatment of these compounds in standard textbooks of inorganic chemistry.