Elementary Solid State Physics: Principles and Applications

Rating:
Summary: A very good textbook
Review: The book is, indeed, much better organized, and much more intelligible and pleasant to use than the unfortunate Kittel "standard." With some tweaking, it's a good undergraduate course textbook and deserves to be wider known. Despite its age (basically, from the mid-1970's), it discusses a number of applications which are of current interest: semiconductor devices and optics, liquid crystals and polymers, some biomolecules. There are very few good solid-state texts, and this one's in the top row.

Rating:
Summary: Far superior to Kittel's book despite age
Review: This is a corrected printing of the 1975 text which was plagued with mistakes. Omar does a good job introducing topics with easy to understand examples and good qualitative explanations. The very first chapter gets the reader off to a good start with a thorough, but understandable, teatment of crystallography (other authors always manage to botch this). Omar's problem sets are lengthier, more varied, and above all, more doable than those in Kittel's text. The problem sets are preceded by a set of qualitative questions, which are good practice for the occasional conceptual problem that the instructor may include on an exam. The text has two minor drawbacks which are forgiveable in light of the dearth of good intorductory texts on the subject. First, the author did not update the text at all, (did he pass away?) but simply corrected many old mistakes. It was undoubtedly an up to date text circa 1975 but his treatment of more specialized topics (i.e. superconductivity) is badly out of date. Of course the basics, such as x-ray diffraction and band theory, have not changed so it is a perfectly good book for a one semester or one quarter course. The second drawback is that the bibliography, which cites textbooks that the author thought useful in the mid-'70's, was not updated either. The first five chapters in this text correspond to the first seven in Kittel. If you are unlucky enough to have been assigned Kittel, reading Omar will clarify many matters and provide you with an abundance of solveable practice problems.