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Title: Condensed Matter Physics
ISBN: 0471177792
Author:
Michael P. Marder
Publicate Date: 2000-01-07
Publish: 2000-01-07
List Price: $143.50
Average Customer Rating: 3.5
Format: Hardcover
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Amazon Lowest New Price: $108.91
Amazon Lowest Used Price: $92.00
Amazon Merchant Price: $114.80
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| Customer Review: |
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1: Comprehensive but poor
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...
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2: Broad coverage, but lacking detail
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.).
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3: corrected printing has appeared
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.
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4: at last, an update for Ashcroft & Mermin's book
The classic solid state / condensed matter text by Ashcroft and Mermin (A&M) is now 25 years old. It's a very accessible and elegantly written book, but condensed matter is a fast-moving subject, and it's embarassing that A&M is still used today. The alternatives have all been too specialized, too formal, and/or too leadenly written in comparison.This book by Marden may finally replace A&M. Like Ashcroft and Mermin, Marden is a member of the Cornell mafia. Some parts of the book practically echo A&M, and the writing style is at least as friendly to the beginning grad student ("Now it will be protested that atoms without dipole moments do not have dipole moments. This is true. However...") But the large number of new developments of the last 25 years are discussed or at least mentioned. In addition to the same-old band structure, magnetism, etc., liquids are covered (a surprising omission in A&M), as are surfaces, soft matter, optical properties of materials, etc. The book is fairly logically structured and works well as a text, except that there is way too much material here to cover in a year. The first printing is full of errors, listed on a web page created by the author. You may want to wait until the second printing before plunking down $95 (too high for impoverished grad students). Top and bottom margins are practically nonexistent. Photographs and shaded 3D drawings are poorly reproduced and murky; they appear to have been printed on a smeary $79.95 inkjet printer and then reproduced.
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