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I might take it on trips and read on the plane. Three stars because it might be a good casual read but I don't intend to pay too much attention to the formulas except at a very high level. The good news this book inspired me to turn to "QFT in a nutshell" that I've had for a few months.
I was looking for a book with formulas rather than one of the many books that avoid them. Good to know I remember enough physics to pick up errors but frustrating to be slowed down so quickly by them. This book seemed like an entry into this study of QFT (at home in spare time).
I've put the book aside after less than 2 chapters. My physics training is 3 decades old now and very rusty.
I quickly got confused and it turns out because of errors in the text rather than the material.
This helpful little book cuts straight to the important material. from lectures, other books, etc) the more use you will get from this book. By reading this book alone, you will not master quantum field theory. It is very much like an outline of basic quantum field theory, so the more you know all around (i.e. I would especially recommend this book to anyone trying to self-study quantum field theory. You probably won't learn much except for some lingo and a few equations. However, if you pair this book with Griffiths Intro to Elementary Particles, or Zee's Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell, then you will get great results.
In other words, it is very helpful to be able to perform the calculations, but one will be limited unless she/he understands the bigger picture of what they're doing and why. The weakness of this book, which is its biggest disappointment, is that it lacks the development of a solid mental model of QFT. QFT Demystified helps with the former and falls short with the later. "Quantum Field Theory Demystified" is a decent review of the subject. Its streghs are its concise reviews of the mechanics that go into crunching the math.
I strongly suggest you do not buy the Kindle version. Those equations that appeared "set off" from the text, that is between sections of text, were apparently converted to images and hence can be read, albeit in many cases the resulting symbols are incredibly small and cannot be enlarged by the Kindle.
appear as boxed question marks. However, the approximately 25% of the equations that are "in-line" with the text cannot be read at all - any greek letters, mathematical symbols, etc.
This book has been reviewed for content by several others. It shows complete lack of editorial control (or self-respect) that this book would be offered for the Kindle.As might be expected of a book on QFT, this book is filled with equations.
If you know your QM and QFT pretty well, you can read around and imagine what should be there, but its not pleasant and woe to the beginner.Unfortunately this experience will make me leery of purchasing any Kindle book on a mathematical topic. In that regard I agree with those who say that despite its warts (various typos and lapses in explanation) it is a good investment and valuable for those seeking to make sense of the usual scattered and disconnected treatments of QFT at the introductory level.But I mean this review to be primarily about the Kindle version as the content has been reviewed by others.
The conversion from the book to the Kindle format was obviously made without ever looking at the result.
Lots of derivations present in this book are either completely omitted or "left for the reader" in other QFT books.In other words, considering that QFT is the most difficult of the "ortodox", i.e. The reasons:1. But don't even approach any of these, if you hadn't mastered the Griffiths book about the elementary particles and the full-blown non-relativistic QM in Dirac's bra-ket notation ). There is essentially nothing about the divergences and renormalization.The reasons, why I don't criticize this book more harshly, are:1.
This is not the first book from which I try to completely understand QFT. well established, physical theories, don't expect any "silver bullet" here. 2. A awaited the coming out of this book with a huge anticipation, because I already owned two other books written by the same author - about the non-relativistic quantum mechanics and about the general relativity, and I consider them great.
There seems to be no really good "introduction" level book about QFT(the closest ones are Lahiri, "A First Book of QFT", Harris, "A Pedestrian Approach to QFT (out of print, used books expensive)., Greiner, "Field Quantization" and Hatfield, "QFT of Point Particles and Strings". There is no such a bullet. Unfortunately, this book doesn't quite fit the bill. The connection between the Lagrangians and the Feynman rules is unclear (for instance, there is nothing mentioned about the Wick's theorem).2.
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