I bought this book after I visited a website about quantum field theory. One recommendation of this website was this book.
This book is extremely clearly written and is pleasant to read, which is impressive for a text book. However, sometimes it lacks depth on the material it covers.
I just want to contribute my five stars. I'm not a specialist or active in this field, but I enjoy trying to to keep up with interesting things I was led to in college.
I never had a formal QFT course in my life, so I was curious to learn it on my own. My curiosity was only incresed by what is called "QFT methods in condensed matter physics", which I am exposed to quite a bit.
When this book was first written, the intermediate vector bosons had only recently been (indirectly) observed, giving more weight to the gauge theory of electroweak interactions. The first edition did not treat the electroweak theory at all, but this, the revised edition, does, albeit using a formalism that is now considered to be somewhat antiquated.
This book is an introduction to QFT for beginners. It starts from basic lagrangian and hamiltonian formalism, outlines a basic but selfcontained treatment of the bosonic and fermionic free fields; the focus shifts then to interacting fields and introduces the concept of radiative corrections with several examples; gauge theories are then presented in a simple form and the Standard Model of electroweak interactions is described briefly.
This is the best book from which to learn quantum field theory for the first time. Its very easy to understand and concise.
If you love physics because you thought that it describes simply and elegantly the world we inhabit, this book might disillusion you for ever.
