Rating: 
Summary: Better than Myers
Review: All I can say is this text is better than that by Myers: it is clearer, more concise, and more rigorous. I found it easy to read, even given that I skipped many sections (the required text for my Solid State course was Myers, so I used this book to fill in gaps left by that one). A classmate of mine used Ashcroft and Mermin instead, and was praising of that text.
Rating: 
Summary: The horror
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: You can do better.
Review: As somebody mentionned the best part of this book are the tables of physical properties. That said, I don't like this book either. There is a solution manual to this book, if you can get your advisor or whoever to sign a letter for it. I don't like this book for a few reasons. First, the explanations aren't that clear. I can't really say why but I've seen better. Second the topic choices in the dielectric and magnetism sections are a little strange (you'll have to compare different books to see what I mean). The section on Fourier transforms and diffraction is confusing. In short I wouldn't get this book. For an undergrad I'd recommend Omar, for a grad student Ashcroft and Mermin is the classic text, though it assumes you know math and Q.M. For the life of me I can't figure out why this book is so popular. In one way, all SS physics books are doomed to fail: because there is so much to cover you're either going to miss some of the detail easy stuff that helps (like A+M) or not be really complete (like most of the undergrad books). Kittel doesn't really do either very well.
Rating:
Summary: Awful in the first, and still awful
Review: As with another reviewer, I was "subjected" to Kittel while at Berkeley (though by another professor) many years ago. It killed my interest in Semiconductor physics completely, and I had to pick it up on the job. I found the book awful then, but hoped he had rewritten it, and decided that with all my many years of Semiconductor experience, I could re-approach it. Sadly, after all these years, he still doesn't get it. Sze is much better.
Rating: 
Summary: ISSP: No better book?
Review: Everybody seems to hate this book. If you think that there is a better introduction to Solid State Physics, then what is it? The problem is that this is not really easy stuff and, if you can't follow this book, then maybe you should be in a different business.
I read this book on my own, over thirty years ago. It was at the beginning of my career in Physics. I don't actually have a copy of this book anymore, but I keep for reference Kittel's much more dense Quantum Theory of Solids. If you think ISSP is hard, then QTOS is much worst: the book has a one-page summary of Quantum mechanics! It assumes that you already know QM and Statistical Mechanics, but it is invaluable as a reference. (I have the 1963 edition, by the way!) The notation is consistent between ISSP and QTOS, which is a big plus.
Rating: 
Summary: Book is bad for a first introduction to solid state physics
Review: I am using this book for my senior solid state course (7th edition) and it is not that helpful!. Many times,I feel that I already need to know what I am trying to learn. This is especially true for the introductory chapters on crystal structures.I would not recommend this book.
Rating:
Summary: A poorly organized book...
Review: I cannot comprehend why Kittel's SSP book has gotten so popular all across the globe at first place. To the best of my knowledge, by no means there is a lack of books on solid state physics. In the past, I have studied from books such as Omar, Ashcroft & Mermin, Ibach & Lueth, Kittel and Dekker and, in my opinion, Kittel is the least effective one among those. For some reason, the organization of the book is quite unorthodox. The chapters are, in my opinion, very disconnected. The topics are not developed by following a sensible line of reasoning which is indeed the foremost requirement of a textbook. One needs to make quantum jumps, back and forth, between chapter to unit the comcepts in a meaningful and coherent manner. Regrettably, I would not recommend this book as an introductory text to SSP. Otherwise the uninitiated student may quite easily develop a ill-posed dislike for a "beautiful" area in physics. I'd say start with Omar and proceed onto Ashcroft and Mermin. Ibach and Luth is also a good primer. If you want to learn more about SSP as applied to Semiconductors then Sze's book is the right choice.
Rating:
Summary: A bad book, don't buy.
Review: I don't know why this book could possibly last to its 7th edition. It's a pain to understand its approach of some topics. In the 7th edition, the page number in the index doesn't match with the real page, which indicates the author and the publisher is so careless. Although the book is not short of tables and graphs, but the word part is just so bad. I know it's hard to find a good SSP book, but so far, Ashcroft and Mermin's is the best.
Rating:
Summary: Hard for an introduction and disorganized.
Review: I don't like this book very much. As my first contact with Solid State Physics it proved, above all, disorganized. Sometimes you have to reread a paragraph (or a whole section) because the explanation to the beginning is in the end of it. I also felt a serious lack of physical intuition over the phenomena at stake. Sometimes two (would be) comparable graphics were side by side with totally different scales and looks, rendering the comparison difficult. Maybe as a reference it could be used, mostly because of the many tables encountered throughout it. But they are present in other (better) books too... As a comparison, I liked Ashcroft & Mermin's "Solid State Physics" a lot more. I am a student of Physics.
Rating:
Summary: Dreadful,
Review: I had the misfortune of having to decipher this book which is easily the worst physics text I have ever encountered. The book is better described as a collection of chapter skeletons rather than a full-fledged and authoritative text. Kittel spends very little time on qualitative explanations and includes very few examples. If you are thinking of teaching yourself from this text, forget about. He skips many steps in his derivations of basic equations,yet he wastes a lot of space trying to illuminate some obscure detail that only a specialist would be interested in. There are very few end of chapter problems and even fewer that are solvable based on his bare-bones chapters. Many seemingly difficult problems are in fact mathematically trivial (i.e. a few lines of high school math, or freshman calculus), but there is no way average students can figure them out no matter how many times they re-read the chapter. If you are unfortunate enough to be assigned this text you will almost certainly be wasting many precious hours reading other books to understand Kittel.
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