Solid State Physics, 2nd Edition

Rating:
Summary: I didn't learn a single thing.
Review: I had this textbook for one of my fourth year undergrad courses. It seemed that Hook & Hall know what they are talking about, but they certainly couldn't explain it to me. Perhaps this text may be useful for graduate studies or as a reference, but I could not recommend it for an introductory course to solid state physics.

Rating:
Summary: Not satisfactory
Review: I used this book in an Introducion to Solid State Physics course, and although I found subjects were well-described and complete, the text was hard to comprehense and quite poorly written.

My professor explained that there are few books that teach Solid State Physics on this level, and that of those books this one may be the best there is. I found it hard to learn from, even though the quality of the information in this book is high.

Rating:
Summary: a different, but worthwhile, approach ¿ try before buying
Review: When Professor Hall lectured Solid State Physics on an undergraduate course at Manchester he deviated from the approach taken in the book, which surprised me somewhat. I'll come back to this later.

The book is very sound if somewhat idiosyncratic. In particular, I found that Hook and Hall used explanatory devices quite different to those followed by my other lecturers, and by most other textbooks. This could be a good or a bad thing, depending on your mental aptitude and/or fondness for their exposition.

I suspect the reason Hall used a different approach in lectures was to tie in with the way we learnt related subject material at Manchester (solid state being just one of three or four compulsory 2nd year courses dealing with atomic and sub-atomic matter).

This is not to say that anything in the book is misleading. It's very well-written and comprehensive, and if this is a subject that you want to learn more about than you can in general texts, I can recommend it as it helped me on several occasions. Perhaps spend half an hour with it in the library or bookshop before buying.

I could not find a better text on solid state at this level when I took my degree in 1995 (IIRC the first edition of Hook-Hall was 1970's, the second early 90's), but that situation may have changed by now.