Customer Reviews: Read 37 more reviews...
 Decent introductory text September 15, 2008
Kittel is a brilliant physicist, but not the greatest at helping beginners. So far this book (as well as the Thermal Physics book) in many spots feels rushed, almost like a summary rather than thoroughly explained concepts. Solid State is difficult to visualize, and the pictures are clear, but I do not think enough is offered to fully picture principals.
 Generations of solid state students suffered July 21, 2008
Generations of solid state physics students, including myself, have been brought up using this text by Kittel. I have also taught from this text numerous times. Poor, poor students! The text "contains" all the requisite material, but its explanations are murky and it it slips major concepts by without making them clear. I have resolved never again to make my students suffer with this text. Ashcroft & Mermin is wonderful book, but too advance as an introductory text. Bube's little book, Electrons in Solids, is a delight but too expensive for students and a little bit too elementary. Despite their limitations, I'm going to use the combination of those from now on.
 Terrible Writing, Written to Memorize Facts and Not understand March 30, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This is a pathetic textbook. The writing in it is awful, and sadly contributes to the stereotype that scientists do not know how to write. It is foolish to always give conclusions before derivations. It gives no motivation whatsoever for approaching certain questions nor the methods in which they are approached. It moves in a very inconsistent manner, developing topics very much at random, most annoyingly fading in and out of discussion of electronic models (Drude, Sommerfeld, Boch, weak periodic, etc). These models are at the core of the development of the field, and Kittel just kind of weaves in and out of random topics without bothering to explain why to describe things in such a manner (no discussion of why phonons are a good way to discuss system, no discussion of why we should obsess over k-space to describe every problem). Ashcroft and Mermin, by comparison, is a fantastic textbook which I highly recommend.
 Solid State Physics Book October 8, 2007
0 out of 7 found this review helpful
This book is in good condition! It also came in good time (a little less than a week). I am a satisfied customer.
I'm sorry September 27, 2007
2 out of 4 found this review helpful
Hey guys, so my friend and I are trying to work through a problem set in our solid state physics course at UC Berkeley and as you might imagine, because Kittel was one of our professors, the department likes to use his books. We love ourselves. Unfortunately for us undergrads (and all of you) we are forced to use his book. Now our problem sets reeeally shouldn't be too much of a problem. For instance, we were asked to solve something for x-ray diffraction and though we had a little bit of an understanding a la Kittel, we found that that little tidbit of knowledge could not in fact be used with confronted with data or a simple experimental setup. There are simply no examples. We have not read Ashcroft or the other books suggested, but after I write this review, we will certainly be out there to purchase another book.
I just wanted to say that I'm sorry we harbored the professor that wrote ths book. I'm sure he's not a bad guy. I know it's hard to write coherently, but seriously this is ridiculous.
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