Condensed Matter Physics

Rating:
Summary: Comprehensive but poor
Review: I admire anyone who attempts to teach all of condensed matter physics in one book. That being said, being comprehensive and being comprehendible are two very different things. While being the former it sacrifices the latter. Marder does not do a good job of explaining the physical concepts needed to build a better understanding of advanced material. In addition, his end-of-chapter problems can be relatively uninformative and tedious i.e. you are left asking why did I just do this problem? Inevitably I find myself going back to Ashcroft & Mermin's wonderful but dated book. Hopefully one day they will publish a new edition...

Rating:
Summary: Broad coverage, but lacking detail
Review: I used Marder's book (the corrected printing) during a solid state physics course this past Spring 2003 semeseter. While I have to commend Marder at his attempt to provide a great deal of breadth on the enormous field of condensed matter, I think he fell short on the details and pedagogy that are necessary for someone new to the subject. Too often, I found myself (and the others I worked with) having to refer to Ashcroft & Mermin's text to complete HW problems assigned out of Marder's book. Also, his notation in certain chapters was unnecessarily confusing, especially the chapter(s) on phonons. I have since read most of the book by Taylor & Heinonen, and I found it to be of much more use than Marder's book. T&H's book is very well written and the concepts flow smoothly from one to the next. In fact, many of the things I struggled to understand last semester were so clearly explained in their text, that I wondered how I could have been so confused! Marder's book has been praised by others as a modern improvement to the A&M standard, but up-to-date topics are of little use if the first-timer has difficulty understanding the nuances of core ideas (e.g., transport, band-structure, and electron-phonon interactions). My opinion is that a good library should include A&M's text for those fundamentals that never go away (crystal structure, semiconductors, etc.) and a book such as T&H's or Chaikin & Lubensky's for the more modern topics ("soft" condensed matter, mesoscopic physics, etc.).

Rating:
Summary: corrected printing has appeared
Review: Note that a corrected printing (not 'new edition') came out in February 2001. Make sure you get this version, which is identified on the cover.