Customer Reviews

Introduction to Solid State Physics

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(16)
1 star:		(18)

 

 

My introductuctory course in solid state physics was taught from Kittel's 2nd edition and I recently taught a first year grad course from his 7th edition. Sadly, the quality of the text has deteriorated with time. The 7th edition is poorly organized, much of the new material is too sketchy to be useful and some of it is flat wrong. References were made to works of various individuals but the actual publications were not cited so it was difficult to locate the original papers.

Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a really good beginning level solid state text available. Aschcroft & Mermin is a little too advanced and has not been revised since the 70's, although I did find myself referring to it frequently to clarify some of the muddle in Kittel's book. Christman is out of print. Ibach and Luth is a little too thin and leaves out many important details. Burns may be a good choice if I teach this course again, altough it is somewhat dated. I certainly won't use Kittel's 7th edition again - my students detested it and I might say, for good reason.

Well, the negative reviews were correct. My solid state course has, unfortunately, decided to go with the Kittel 'standard' text, 8th edition. This book is difficult to learn from - largely because there is a severe shortage of quality examples and the material is not well explained throughout.

If you also are forced to use this text for a course, I would HIGHLY recommend purchasing supplement texts:

1. Solid State Theory, Walter A. Harrison (1979) - one of the best
2. Elementary Solid State Physics, M. Ali Omar (1999) - also good
3. Solid State Physics, Ashcroft/Mermin (1976/2003) - good

I cannot comprehend why someone as bright as Kittel, who made very substantial contributions to solid state theory, was not capable of writing an effective introductory (and hence elementary) text on SSP.

The book is ineffective in conveying the "message" and yet has been so popular as a textbook despite it pedagogical problems.Itis as if there was a shortage of textbooks of acceptable quality out there, and professors teaching SSP had to settle for Kittel's book!

In order to save some youngsters from the painful experience of reading Kittel's book, I recommend the books authored by Omar, Ashcroft & Mermin, Ibach & Lueth, and Dekker. I would consider Ibach & Lueth as an introductory text, while Ashcroft & Mermin is more graduate level (and dated). Omar's book is elementary, yet well structured, and the exposition is crystal clear. And if your interests are in semiconductor physics, try Sze's books as well as Cardona's.

SSP is a beautiful subject to study, provided that it is properly taught and the student is furnished with well-written books. I hope that someone will come up with a new text and provide a modern treatment of the subject sometimes soon.

November 2006 Update: A colleague of mine indicated that the first edition of Kittel's book, which dates back to 1966, was a "coherent" text, discussing topics in a systematic manner. He indicated that the updates in the ensuing years made it rather disorganized. As such, my review appertains to recent versions of the book.

Entropy4Life

Kittel's Introduction to Solid State Physics is not a standard text by accident. It presents a wide range of topics in solid state physics at the level of sophistication typical of college seniors or new graduate students in physics. Whenever I am faced with any problem in condensed matter physics, I can confidently turn to Kittel, knowing that there is almost certainly an elementary explanation of the phenomenon in the book and references to further sources for more detailed or advanced treatments.

The ordering of topics in the book does not appear to display much continuity. However, the chapters are presented in a rough order of increasing difficulty, which is also the order in which those topics are introduced in a typical solid state physics class. The first twelve chapters, in particular, provide a good outline of a one-semester course in the basics of the subject. The ordering of the later chapters in not as logical, but the selection of topics used by instructors beyond the basics is very diverse. Introduction to Solid State Physics covers most of the interesting further topics that could reasonably be covered by a student familiar with the first half of the text.

In covering these further topics, the latest edition of the book offers a great deal of information about current topics in physics. The treatment of magnetic resonance, while hardly exhaustive, treats the major methods of the field in enough detail that an interested student could easilty learn more. Many of the topics, such as interface physics, are relatively new, but Kittel's treatment is excellent, stressing new experimental results whenever possible.

Kittel provides a great deal of experimental data as examples and to help the reader form a physical intuition about the effects being discussed. Moreover, the level of the physics and math required are not terrible advanced. For example, rather than delving into the details of BCS theory in the lengthy chapter on superconductivity, Kittel instead spends time on the experimentally observed facts of the phenomenon, treating Type I and Type II superconductors, the details of the Meissner effect, and other empirical topics.

The greatest weakness of the book is its somewhat awkward prose. However, an interested student should have little trouble with Kittel's style if he starts with the relatively easy early chapters, to get used to the style of writing.

A nightmare... The prose is both laconic and imprecise - a combination that spells very poor readability. The book assumes too much knowledge for an undergraduate text: in order not to get confused you'd have to be comfortable with QM including Dirac notation, Hamiltonian mechanics, results from e&m in matter, atomic physics, and a good deal of thermal and statistical physics. It's actually worse than that, because the book simply uses results or assumes familiarity with some technique without stating so much as "it is well-known from X..."

If this weren't bad enough, the main body of the text is cluttered with pedagogically useless references to charts and experimental data. This always disrupts the flow of logic and makes already inadequate explanations even harder to follow.

The problems are usually trivial once the light bulb is on and you've come to grips with the concepts involved. The problem here though is that, for above-mentioned reasons, it takes much, much longer to learn anything from this book than it should given the actual level of complexity of the material.

If this book is required for a course, then be sure you at least have a teacher whose lectures you can learn from. A bad teacher plus this book will ensure that you have one hell of a stressful semester.

Please pay attention to the negative reviews, they are accurate. If you are required to buy this book you will also need Ashcroft and Mermin as a minimum.

Note to professors: Please don't waste our time with books like this!

As a student, this book was used for our "introductory solid state physics" class. This book was one of the main reason that I didn't finish the class until three years later and almost gave up on solid state physics.

To be more concrete, some of the problems I have with this beast are:

1. Kittel has the annoying habit of saying somethings first, and motivating it afterwards. In the beginning, I found myself constantly agitated because I didn't understand a thing he said. Desperately, I read on and found that he was explaining it on the next page.

2. The constant mixture of qm and classical physics annoyed me.

3. I always had the feeling that Kittel doesn't understand what he is saying himself. This could be because I didn't, though...

Maybe, people find this work usefull as a reference work, I cannot comment on that, but it is a really lousy introductory text.

This book cannot be used to learn solid state physics. Kittel has a problem with leaving out large portions of derivations. It seems that with each successive edition he removes essential details in return for covering new science. There is also a problem with Kittel's use of terminology. He uses the term lattice to refer to bravais lattices. It is a small but confusing distinction. This is not a good introductory book, though it is quite useful as a reference material after you have some background in solid state physics.

This book has been compared so much with A&M that I have a suggestion - read both together! There are some parts in Kittel where a better treatment can be found in A&M, such as the treatment on Bravais lattice. And A&M goes into greater detail into some topics such as the Drude and Sommerfeld theory of metals. But I feel that there are many areas where Kittel is superior simply because the notation is simpler and the treatment more concise. See, for instance, the material on the empty lattice approximation and energy bands. Kittel is also more updated, and the 8th edition includes a chapter on nanostructures written by Paul McEuen.

Kittel is not a perfect book, but neither is A&M. The two, however, seem to complement each other. There are many instances when I come across something I do not understand, and I find it explained better in the other book. So if you have the time (and money!), read both!

This the worst physics book that I've ever studied. The book made me so confused that I got lost even in the most basic concepts.
It's hard to see why this book is so popular in the introductory level solid state courses. I began to learn the basic concepts of the solid state physics after I'd begun studying from other introductory level solid state books, such as Ashcroft-Mermin.