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The second edition of this book is slightly enlarged in some subject areas and improved throughout. The enlargement comprises subjects that turned out to be too essential to be missing, even in a basic introduction such as this one. One example is the tight‐binding model for electronic states in solids, which is now added in its simplest form. Other enlargements reflect recent developments in the field that should at least be mentioned in the text and explained on a very basic level, such as graphene and topological insulators.

I decided to support the first edition by online material for subjects that were either crucial for the understanding of this text but not familiar to all readers, or not central enough to be included in the book but still of interest. This turned out to be a good concept, and the new edition is therefore supported by an extended number of such notes; they are referred to in the text. The notes can be found on my website www.philiphofmann.net.

The didactic presentation has been improved, based on the experience of many people with the first edition. The most severe changes have been made in the chapter on magnetism but minor adjustments have been made throughout the book. In these changes, didactic presentation was given a higher priority than elegance or conformity to standard notation, for example, in the figures on Pauli paramagnetism or band ferromagnetism.

Every chapter now contains a “Further Reading” section at the end. Since these sections are supposed to be independent of each other, you will find that the same books are mentioned several times.

I thank the many students and instructors who participated in the last few years' Solid State Physics course at Aarhus University, as well as many colleagues for their criticism and suggestions. Special thanks go to NL architects for permitting me to use the flipper‐bridge picture in Figure 11.3, to Justin Wells for suggesting the analogy to the topological insulators, to James Kermode for Figure 3.7, and to Arne Nylandsted Larsen and Antonija Grubišić Čabo for advice on the sections on solar cells and magnetism, respectively.