The Oxford Solid State Basics

I'm going to be taking solid state physics this fall, and while I usually prefer textbooks over lectures, Ashcroft and Mermin is too dense for me to want to read as more than a reference and for the practice problems, and unfortunately MIT OCW doesn't have as much material available for condensed matter as it tends to for other physics courses. I found this lecture series to be very engaging. The professor is funny and he grounds the lectures well in motivation. The book that follows this series best is his own textbook for undergraduates, but it begins with an approach similar to Ashcroft and Mermin (but better, in my opinion) in that he presents improvements to heat capacity models sequentially, showing how each improvement adhered better to data than the previous model. I look forward to continuing his series.