Theoretical Books

I'd like to start off by stating that I find this book to be so amazing that this is the first review I've ever written for anything I've bought (and I purchase many things online, mostly computer parts).

I've always had a fascination with quantum physics, general relativity and the ever-illustrious black hole, but this book perpetuated that interest so much further.

Thorne, a professor at Caltech, puts nearly every possible aspect of general relativity, exploding/imploding supernovae, black holes, and space in general into a very easy to follow, yet in depth format.

His analogies are excellent and he draws a very clear picture of the greatest minds in theoretical physics' history without getting too complex. He throws in mathematical equations and a few diagrams I didn't follow at first, but after I read it through I was able to go back and comprehend much of what he had written.

All in all, this is a wonderful book to get a REAL first grasp on theoretical physics and general relativity.

Really makes difficult concepts understandable in addition it is a
joy to read. Not like a boring or overwhelming text book.

... you have found the book.

The whole history on the subject, a clear account on how Einstein's work and the subsequent decades of study on black holes have changed mankind's view on time and space. A very accessible book, written in an engaging style by a true authority on the subject.

No surprise this book rates in the absolute top in the category science here on Amazon (average review rating of 4.77 stars).

What else is there to say? Oh yes, the price: simply a steal at about 2 cents/page.

I have read more physics books after reading this one, only to be disappointed. No other book no matter how well written, with so very few expections to few to mention can compare with how well this book reads. It's surprising what a fast read it is as well. I strongly suggest anyone who is at least alittle interested in this subject matter start here.

I thought I was pretty much done with the theory of black holes. I have read dozens of articles and books on the subject - so I wasn't expecting much extra from Kip Thorne's "Black Holes & Time Warps". But this book blew me away with its deep theoretical detail; human insight; and rich historical content. Thorne doesn't just want to tell you about the weird mindblowing theories of what black holes are (although he does a fabulous job of doing that); he wants to tell you the full evolution of thought on the subject. It's a killer detective story full of fascinating characters with egos clashing and conjectures crashing up against the shoals of theory - and ultimately a deeply, almost religiously mysterious emerging fusion Einstein's field theory and Quantum mechanics called Quantum Gravity.

Kip Thorne is an experienced educator (and a parent) as well as a master of theory of relativity of the highest order. He is also fluent in Russian and has functioned as a liaison between Soviet physicists and the West for decades. He has worked personally with the giants in the field through the golden age of black hole research. His experience as an educator and deep experience and insight into the theories allows him to ably sketch them out for the layman. His depth of personal experience with the physicists who have led the assault allows him to populate the narrative with real flesh and blood people who struggle with ultimate truths in a human and deeply comprehensible way. Personal touches abound, such as facsimiles of signed bets between Thorne and Stephen Hawking, that convey the spirit and playfulness that goes on. He gives wonderful accounts of the process of physics work, describing the isolation, the moments of "eureka" where long considered problems emerge from the subconscious miraculously solved. This insight into inspiration is powerful stuff and you get it again and again from Einstein's central paradigm shift that shattered the Newtonian view of absolute space and time to Chandrasekhar's ship-board calculations that revealed the limit to the size of white dwarfs - and implied the inevitability of black holes to his mentor's dismay, through Hawking's bedtime realization about black hole growth and evaporation and much more. Thorne puts you there and really lets you feel it. These thrills and chills combine the exultation of someone cracking a hard puzzle with the child-like wonder of standing small beside the ocean or the vast dome of stars.

The physics in this book aren't lightweight. Thorne spares you the deep math (a taste of it is found in the footnotes), but the diagrams and concepts require some concentration. He presents these concepts with lucidity and tons of graphic visual aids. It's hard for me to gauge the accessibility of the science here since I've covered this ground before, but my sense is, anyone who has got through high-school physics can handle it.

The story doesn't end with the theory. Thorne takes us through the discovery of pulsars and x-ray and radio sources that provide physical evidence of black holes. "Black Holes & Time Warps" was published in 1993, so it's a bit dated. There's no mention of quark stars (a bit of quantum mechanical refinement to the notion of neutron stars). The hardest part to take was Kip Thorne's chapter on LIGO - the huge multinational attempt to detect gravitational waves. Thorne really gave birth to the LIGO project and in "Black Holes & Time Warps" he allows himself in the last two pages of the LIGO chapter to lovingly describe a potential scenario where in 2007 an observation of black hole coalescence is made. It's heartbreaking given that as of 2009 LIGO still hasn't make any confirmed observations of gravitational waves after almost 2 decades. I have little doubt that Thorne's beautiful vision will eventually come to pass, but the long desert and struggle conveyed by his underestimation of the time is certainly a sad moment.

There's so much in here that transcends the physics - particularly in the depiction of the cold war, the impact of the nuclear bomb effort on the science of physics and astrophysics, and the horrible toll that Stalin's purges took on the people at the forefront of Soviet scientific research. All in all, this is one of the best works of science popularization and history of science I have ever read. Highest recommendation.

I'm leader of a small group of engineers working in the area of air flight vehicles particularly those that are unmanned. Our primary interest is flight control but more recently inertial navigation. Had a background in maths obviously but quaternions had always been a bit scary. Have bought several books on quaternions from Amazon but this one is by far the best. It is easy to read and particularly like the "fact box" approach using the page margins. Saves retracing back through the pages. Very well presented and difficult areas reinforced. It bridged the gap between direction cosine matrices etc to quaternions for our group...quaternions are no longer scary.

IGNORE MY COMMENT ABOUT THE ERRATA: The errata on the author's web site have been corrected in the version now being shipped. Besides, Amazon censored the hyperlink I attempted to provide below.

I've just begun the book and like it so far. Other reviews here seem pretty accurate and fair. Because several reviewers noted the presence of errors in the book, I tracked down the errata so I could correct the mistakes before I got confused by them. Here is errata from Kuiper's personal web pages: [...].

Kelly Carter
[...]

The great thing about this book is the author goes through detailed expositions of every topic. So if you "get it" the first time, you can skim ahead to the next topic; if not, you can work through the proofs, step-by-step, to make sure you understand it. There's no "the proof is left as an exercise for the interested reader."

Another thing I really like about this book is that you don't need to be a mathematician to understand it (i.e. it's perfect for engineers). If there is reference to a mathematical topic, the author defines the terminology and gives you a concise explanation. He will give you enough to make it relevant to the current subject.

For example, you don't need to have a grad-school course in groups and fields to be able to understand how they relate to the specific applications of quaternions covered in the book. That cannot be said about some other books on quaternions I have been reading. About all you need here is some knowledge of vectors, matrices and complex numbers.

This book is not only tractable but downright accessible. And it is so well organized that, after reading the first few chapters, you may find the specific application of interest to you and jump straight to it.

Excellent book. Well written. Clear. Thoughtful.
Plenty of examples. I would highly recommend it!

There are many other reviews that discuss (and applaud) the merits of Kuipers' treatment of the subject, and I agree with them. Rather than add a "me too", I wanted to treat some of the features of this book that make it approachable.

This book is not written for the layman, you do need a fair grounding in matrix methods, complex variables, and rotations. If you remember the basics you should be fine because Kuipers reminds you of special theorems and properties as they are used. Notation is kept simple and unconfusing.

Of particular note, he uses the margins in a novel way. Most math texts number their equations and refer to them often. The reader spends a lot of time flipping back and forth. Kuipers frequently puts referenced equations, needed properties, and other information in the margins where they are needed. This minimizes the usual back and forth and enables a marginally sophisticated reader to actually read and learn something new in bed.

I read this book when I was in middle school and found it both inspiring and amusing.
I highly recommend this book for both kids and grown up non-physicists. You even find some of your daily life questions in there. Epstein presents a scientific approach to think about them.

This is very well written. It emphasizes the physical theory and avoids the complex mathematics. I would recommend to all beginners trying to better understand the reasons behind certain physical phenomenon.

The book is a compilation of science/physics puzzles, brain teasers, one to two pages long. It's the kind of book to have for the odd moment. I gave it to my son-in-law for Christmas, and teased that it was a bathroom book. . .

Scott Adams once said "Genius can be defined by the degree to which something intellectual can be felt as a physical experience"

This book teaches you to solve physics problem by visualizing them geometrically. It is so good it ought to still be in print!

I read part of this book in a bookstore and in the author's other book Relativity Visualized.

There is a quiz about Magnet Car: in the picture, a guy dangles a fishing pole with fishing string tied to a big magnet, and he is standing inside an iron cart. the magnet is very close to outside body of the iron kart. The question is: will the cart move. (warning: answer is mentioned here next...)

The answer on the book is: no it won't, because there is not work done from zero work input. And that there is no perpetual machine and Newton's Third Law says action equal reaction but in opposite direction, and they cancel out, etc.

Now, I can tell you that is not the case, because it is a fishing pole and fishing string, the magnet will get attracted to the cart's body, get pulled over a bit, while the cart is also pulled over a bit (less than how much the magnet has moved if we assume the cart is heavier than the big magnet). Why? Because the magnet experiences a force pulling it towards the cart, and what is there to stop it from moving? The fishing string? Sorry, if it were a metal crane or something rigid, that is really the case: the magnet wants to move, but pushes the crane that is bolted to the cart, and the cart wants to move towards the magnet, but the crane is pushing it exactly the other way with the same force, just opposite direction, so the 2 forces cancel out and the magnet and the cart won't move. Note, however, that now it is not something rigid like a crane but is a fishing pole and fishing string. If the magnetic force is strong enough, the magnet will get attracted and sway towards the cart, and the cart will be moved a little bit too. But the overall center of mass of the whole system (what is called the physical body) remain unchanged. Also imagine if it is a crane, but it is a weak crane made of paper cones. If the magnetic force is strong enough, the paper crane will also bend and have a similar scenario as the fishing pole and string. I hope the description can be more accurate.

This is a refreshingly unique book about logical and statistical inference. It's the antidote to cookbooks of statistical tests.

I would recommend it to anyone who: understands calculus at a high school level, enjoyed a previous class or book on probability, and desires a solid understanding of statistics.

D.S. Sivia's short book is a good companion, because of its additional worked-out examples.

Errata: http://ksvanhorn.com/bayes/jaynes/index.html

First off, I can in good conscience only recommend this book to experts who already have a deep understanding of both Bayesian and frequentist probability theory. The most useful function of this book is to illuminate puzzling features of probability theory that niggle at the minds of experts. If you don't already understand the subject at a fairly deep level, Jaynes will only leave you confused. (I could not imagine the torment of someone trying to learn probability and statistics for the first time from this book!)

Expect little in the way of examples or practical solutions here. Jaynes is concerned more with fundamentals and philosophy. Phil Gregory's textbook, although overly fond of Mathematica, is a better intro to practical applications. What examples there are tend to be highly idealized, with a high amount of tedious calculation.

Jaynes died with his book in an unfinished state. What he needed was an editor, but what he got instead was a hagiographer. Rather than inject himself into Jaynes' work, the editor instead has left all of the flaws, incomplete explanations, and many out-and-out mistakes in place. This was a bad mistake. Too many important points are left as exercises to the reader.

Jaynes himself is highly infuriating on a number of points. He repeatedly argues for a Haldane prior as a non-informative prior for a binomial distribution, but doesn't come to grips with the fact that this improper prior gives absurd results in some limits, whereas the more commonly used and more robust Jeffreys prior is ignored. Jeffreys priors themselves are scarcely mentioned in most places, while discussion of how to apply KL information measures to construct non-informative priors is completely missing. Jaynes' commentary on the state of quantum mechanics will strike most physicists as misguided as at best.

I find it ironic that I have mostly negative things to say about a book that I rank at 4 out of 5. The trouble is that this could have been the greatest single book ever written on the subject if it only had better editing, fewer polemics, and a more practical bent. I find myself mourning for what this book could have been. What it actually is, however, is a great probability text from a Bayesian perspective. It contains many gems, but you have to wade through a lot to find them.

Jaynes' book is a deep and opinionated exposition of probability theory and Baysean reasoning -- with detours into the nature of inductive reasoning, and a non-trivial investigation of scientific epistemology. The prose style is stunningly good -- by any standard, not just the low bar set by mathematical texts -- and the exposition is both rigorous and philosophically provocative. I'm a scientist, and can safely say I've not enjoyed a mathematics book as much as this one since I was a child reading Alice in Wonderland.

I actually bought this three years ago (or so) when I needed an emergency crash-course in statistics -- of course, I found it utterly useless as a cookbook! It sat on my shelf for years, and I looked at it guiltily, until I was faced in my work with far more complex situations than the usual recipes could cover. I sat down for a few hours and by the end I was hooked.

This is a great book. Getting it all together is well worth the price. Jaynes is always a joy to read, polemical and opinionated as he is. One of the very few writers who can put drama into the dry subject of statistics. This is a book about the subject of statistics, rather than a statistics book, with a lot of critical thought and criticism of other statisticians, and statistical paradoxes. It's not, however, the book to choose if you just want another text to help you pass your stats course as its more about the why rather than the how of statistical thinking and logic.

Its hard to write a review for this book. There are definitely flaws, but the information in this book, is just not anywhere else. This is the first place I had ever seen a general form of the rule of succession, or a worthwhile logical attack on the Copenhagen interpretation. It is a very interesting and thought provoking book, but is also a good practical reference for advanced probability problems.

It is not necessary to be an engineer to read, understand, and enjoy this book. However, if you are an engineer like me, then there is a good chance that you completed your coursework on thermodynamics without gaining a good intuitive feel for what entropy actually is. I have searched thermodynamics texts for years looking for an explanation of entropy that left me intellectually satisfied. I have finally found that explanation in "Entropy Demystified." This book far surpasses anything I have read on the topic of entropy. The remarkable thing is that the book does not rely on complicated mathematics, or technical jargon. While reading the book, I found I was constantly telling myself, "Of course! That makes sense!"
This book is a great read. I wish I could give it 10 stars.

50 years too late! This book would have been a great help when I was introduced to Thermodynamics. At least the current generation will benefit.

I'm a sociologist/social worker by training who has also studied a fair amount of statistics and physical science. I'm interested in the trend involving physicists using tools from statistical mechanics to study social issues, and this is why I turned to Entropy Demystified. The book is simply superb. Ben-Naim does a masterful job of explaining the relatively obscure notion of entropy in terms of everyday objects like coins or dice. He also carefully points out where analogies between these things and real particles work and where such analogies might be overdrawn. The book uses some math, but anyone who has finished high school or, perhaps, middle school should be able to handle it. In short, the book really does what it set out to do. It makes the concept of entropy crystal clear, and I look forward to reading Ben-Naim's new book on statistical thermodynamics.

Just finished Professor Ben-Naim's excellent introduction to entropy. For over 100 years entropy has been mistakenly attributed as synonymous with disorder. The good professor uses simulated games to demonstrate that entropy is "basically a law of probability." The text is approachable for the non-math specialist and the games are entertaining and enlightening.
Highly recommended.

Entropy Demystified, by Prof. Arieh Ben-Naim, is an absolute gem! Using very simple, easily followed, "games" with dice, Ben-Naim delivers handsomely on his promise, made at the beginning of the book, to remove all mystery from the concept of entropy and to make the reader appreciate that entropy is not only not a mystery but it is nothing more than a consequence of common sense. No advanced mathematics is required, only some very basic concepts in probability and a feeling for "large" numbers, both of which are developed for the reader so that no advanced preparation is required.

As a physicist, I am well aware that many more of my colleagues than might care to admit it are not altogether comfortable with the notion of entropy and, unfortunately, share, and even perpetuate, some of the inappropriate interpretations that have become fashionable, such as that entropy is a measure of the disorder of a system. Putting aside the fact that "disorder" is an ill-defined concept, entropy is not always synonymous with what one might characterize as disorder, as Ben-Naim well illustrates in the last chapter of the book.

If you would really like to know, once and for all, what entropy really is, and to be certain beyond any doubt, this is the book for you. What I especially like about the book is that Ben-Naim has also lived up to the first law of good technical writing, which is that it is the author's duty and responsibility to consider the reader first and foremost. At every step of the way, Ben-Naim anticipates the next question likely to be in the mind of the reader and provides immediate clarification. It is almost as though Ben-Naim is there in the room with you providing immediate feedback on every detail. His ability to anticipate and respond to the needs of the reader in this way is a rare talent indeed that makes this book a sheer delight to read and assures that the promise to remove all mystery concerning entropy will be fulfilled by the time you reach the last chapter. Actually, by the time you reach the next-to-last chapter. The last chapter is reserved for some of Ben-Naim's personal reflections on entropy, itself fascinating reading, enhanced immeasurably by the understanding provided by the preceding chapters.

This book is not going to teach you thermodynamics or statistical mechanics, and is not intended to do so. It's sole purpose is to give you a clear and unambiguous understanding of what entropy really is. Prof. Ben-Naim has succeeded in spades.

Those who may be interested in a more "in depth" discussion of statistical mechanics based on information, perhaps as the next step after Entropy Demystified, can take a look at Ben-Naim's recent book "A farewell to Entropy; Statistical Thermodynamics based on Information."

This book covers all the basics about Quantum Mechanics for Chemists. I highly recommend it for all Chemist Students.

This is the best ever text in quantum mechanics. Every one which intents start in this field should read this book. It contains all the elementary steps to understand this difficult field in a language and in such detail which is not found any more in the modern books.

Don't let anyone tell you quantum mechanics is easy because it isn't. It is the hardest subject anyone can even attempt to learn. In my experience most books are written by people who are too brilliant and use maths which is too advanced for the average non-brilliant person to understand. This book is one of the best simple introductions to quantum mechanics I have read. Yes there is a lot of hard maths but let me assure you it is one book you should have on your bookshelf when you get totally lost and need to start again.

John

I read it once and don't use it too often. It's still an excellent book, but I think there are newer texts that are based on this one that may "look better" even though they cover the same topics. I enjoyed it very much. Pauling knew how to take a complicated subject and simplify (but not too much) it for ease of teaching.

Great, great book.

As an alum holding both undergrad and graduate degrees in a related field, I figured I would pick this title up for some pretty heavy reading. I was right. Even thought the title says "an introduction", there are several pre-requisites to understanding Quantum Mechanics, and the style of Linus Pauling's writing in general. The book reads very much like a textbook, and I would suggest at least a pretty good understanding of physics, mathematics, and technical writing before diving in. It's a great book, and a classic text. It's just not a casual Sunday read.

This book is really easy to get into. The first chapter on its own is worth the purchase price. After thumbing through that, I was in a position to start solving interesting problems. I was up and running with the basics within a day or so. Other books on the Calculus of Variations are a lot harder to get into and much more difficult to readily apply to problem solving.

Other books that present variational principles generally do it formally in terms of Frechet and Gateux derivatives on Banach spaces, whereas here, the approach is a little bit more ad hoc. The former approach can be heavy going for people who aren't (very) comfortable with functional analysis and even then, actually solving specific problems can be headache. Fomin and Gelfand on the other hand demand very few prerequisites of their readers. It might not be the best book for pure mathematicians, but I don't think it was written for pure mathematicians. It's the perfect book for non-mathematicians looking to solve specific variational problems in their own fields (in my case economics).

My acquintance with the book starts with a course in
calculus of variations in Israel Institute of Technology - Technion.
I recommend this book as a prepration for the advanced
methods in chapter 8 of Tensors Differential Forms and Variational Principles - David Lovelock and Hanno Rund. Anyone who is about to study a course in General Relativity should take a year or leisure two years and read both books. I also recommend this book to anyone who deals with
shape matching, signal processing and image processing.

I like this book, certainly what I have read of it. I'm now digging around near page 75, and it struck me that for the first time I really "get it" - In particular, this was about the use of the Legendre transform. The authors start with a very gentle introduction of it, and then, while things become more abstract, the text never jumps too far and never leaves the reader too much in puzzling. It's ought to be studied though, and it's not "easy".

This book is a "must have" for those wanting to study topics in functional analysis.

As a physicist I want to find a book to refresh my memory on theoretical mechanics. I came across this one, and after reading its first 4 chapters in continuation, I kow I don't need any other book. What a treat! Written by a past master, the book costs you next to nothing; yet as it's written by sure hand, it hasn't slightest pretention, just plain and insightful, natural and smoth flow, leads you almost effortlessly fowward. Even though I learned the subject before, I don't know of or even imagine a better exposition. Wow, I started to love Russian mathematicians.

Best book on CM (based most on symplectic formulation). Extremely clear if one has enough patience to follow exactly the author's way and to work out the proposed stimulating problems. Contains an original way of introducing differential forms, integration of differential forms and homology/De Rahm's thm.: you fully get in the subject in few pages ! The first part does not make use of symplectic formalism but is also quite original and stimulating. The level is last yr. undergr. 1st yr. graduate. Very useful if used with E. ott (Chaos in Dynamical Systems) for studying nonlinear dynamics.

Extremely stimulating, uses Galileo to motivate Newton's laws instead of postulating them. Treatment of Bertrand's theorem is beautiful, but contains one error (took me 2 years before I realized where..). However, I know of only one physicist who successully worked out all the missing steps and taught from this book. I know mathematicians who have cursed it. I used/use it for inspiration. The treatment of Liouville's integrability theorem, I found too abstract, found the old version in Whittaker's Analytical Dynamics to be clearer (Arnol'd might laugh sarcastically at this claim!)--for an interesting variation, but more from the standpoint of continuous groups, see the treatment in ch. 16 of my Classical Mechanics (Cambridge, 1997). In my text I do not restrict the discussion of integrability/nonintegrability to Hamiltonian systems but include driven dissipative systems as well. Another strength of Arnol'd: his discussion of caustics, useful for the study of galaxy formation (as I later learned while doing work in cosmology). Also, I learned from Arnol'd that Poisson brackets are not restricted to canonical systems (see also my ch. 15). I guess that every researcher in nonlinear dynamics should study Arnol'd's books, he's the 'alte Hasse' in the field.

This book is an excellent introduction to the world of classical physics for NON-PHYSICISTS. While some physicists will no doubt find it accessible, there is considerable reduction of physical concepts in order to get to the heart of the ideas underlying the formalism. Also, the material goes beyond what most physicists (non-theoreticians) will find practical.

He focuses largely on a geometric presentation, in the language of differential geometry, symplectic geometry, differential forms, Riemannian manifolds and includes a large amount of algebraic necessities. This is not a cookbook for learning how to solve classical mechanics, nor is it a math book per se, but it is a wonderful collection of introductions to a vast amount of useful mathematical formalism that permeates the physical literature. I would strongly recommend it to someone needing a thorough supplementary mechanics text, one that relies on very little physical insight and focuses on the geometric and algebraic structures underlying them.

The chapters are very well self-contained for the most part so you can skip to topics you find more appealing without feeling lost. Also, his presentation style is very clever, in case you're a fan of quick thinking and novel presentations (who isn't?).

The prerequisites are familiarity with somewhat advanced calculus and "mathematical maturity". Basic knowledge of group theory would also make it an easier read.

The book is full of little enjoyable details (jewels). Arnold is one of the few mathematicians which approaches problems with a very geometric point of view. In his interview with S.H. Lui he mentions how algebraic picture has dominated the research in mathematics and how he has tried to counter that. One can see the trace of his ingenuity all over this book. What some may call as handwaving in math circles is indeed called as physical (or geometric) intuition in physics community and is being actively encouraged.

The chapters on oscillations (chap. 5) and perturbation theory (chap. 10) are very instructive. For example, parametric resonance is discussed concisely in chapter 5 which you won't be able to find it anywhere else. where can you learn about "Arnold's tongues" better than in Arnold's book?

There are so many appendices at the end of the book. They are often very specialized and I don't recommend you to read them on your first read.

In conclusion, I recommend this book to any physics graduate student. In fact, I hope one day it will be used as a text book for courses in classical mechanics.

I have to admit that I haven't thoroughly read through this text. But judging from the first 10 pages, there is a lot of mathematical handwaving. In contrast, foundations of mechanics (hereafter FOM) is far superior in that it provides all the necessary background beyond calculus and linear algebra to the reader, and is logically consistent so far in my reading. I want to mention that there are certainly complete and excellent texts out there on functional analysis, differential geometry, and topology, but many texts include way more stuff than you would want to know. In particular, it is my humble opinion that once you get to a certain point of knowledgeability of a subject like algebraic topology, you have enough of a taste for it that to learn more of the subject would only help if you were to go into research. Therefore a book like FOM provides a concise and practical treatment of those various advanced mathematics topics.

Greene's Protective Groups in Organic Synthesis (Purchased on 10/02/2008)
by Peter G. M. Wuts

i'm do organic synthesis. i reference this one once a week on average. it's the first stop whenever a protecting group questions comes up.

if you are synthetic chemist you ought to have this book with you

This book contains methods for the installation and removal of practically every protecting group you can think of, and likely some you've never encountered. Most methods are referenced to articles containing representative procedures, saving valuable time scouring the literature. It is compact, well-organized and reasonably priced. Along with March's Advanced Organic Chemistry, this book is a must have for any organic chemist.

There are other protecting group books out there but I found this one to be the most comprehensive and easy to use.

This is a useful book. For the first section he is mostly doing phi^3
theory in 6 dimensions, which is unrealistic but good because he can
touch on all the crucial concepts like renormalization, and asymptotic
freedom in this simple context, making them as understandable as possible.
He never sweeps subtleties under the rug, so you really learn how they
arise. And he is careful with factors of i and 2 etc, so you have
confidence that there is really a coherent story to follow, and it is
worth your time to work things out for yourself. (Lots of misprints,
but a well-maintained web page lists them.)

Things I found less convenient:

1) There is only one level of structure: short chapters. There are no
sub-sections in chapters to make the logic clearer. And he refuses to
ever cite any equation from another chapter, so either he repeats
equations unnecessarily, or just cites a whole chapter, leaving you to
search it for the relevant equation. And so there is no single place
where all the crucial results are collected. Each time you need a
basic formula you have to search through the book for it.

2) Charged scalar fields are important as a precursor to fermions
but are only studied in the problems. In phi^3 the field is neutral.

3) Symmetry factors are never properly explained. There is a detailed
discussion on real-space Feynman diagrams, but then suddenly he
switches to momentum space, and we never learn how to do symmetry
factors for an arbitrary momentum-space diagram.

The book gives an elegant introduction into all of the basic ideas of quantum field theory (Feynman diagrams, renormalization, scattering amplitudes and cross sections, symmetries and conserved currents, etc.) for the simplest field - the scalar field, using the powerful technique of path integrals.
The book is excellent for beginners. The text is very readable and the physical ideas are well emphasized, however there is a lack of mathematical rigor.

I think that this book is the best QFT book for self-teaching; reading through the chapters you see that nothing is left unexplained or presumed; furthermore references to other good QFT books give you the opportunity to easily find more detailed treatement of many topics, which is good also to explore different points of view

Quantum Field Theory by Mark Srednicki is a true gem. He posts a (beta)pdf of the text on his website so you can see for yourself. However, In the words of John Baez: "nothing beats sitting in a cafe with a friend, notebooks open, and working together on a regular basis." So get the book, work through the problems, and (as much as possible) discuss them with a buddy over coffee. Cheers to good physics.

Background: I used this book in an introductory graduate course in QFT at Brown University, but I had read through a couple of other QFT texts before taking this course.

The book is split into three main sections: 1) scalar fields 2) spinor fields and 3)vector fields. By developing QFT exclusively for scalar fields in the first section, Srednicki is able to separate the difficult parts of field theory from the complications and technicalities of spinor algebra, which was very helpful for me.
Also, this approach allows the author to discuss some subtle aspects of quantum field theory much earlier on than usual (for example: effective field theories, Wilsonian renormalization, the renormalization group, spontaneous symmetry breaking, etc...). In particular, the book contains the best introduction to renormalization that I have seen. It takes a very modern standpoint, and was able to clear up many of my conceptual issues with the topic.
There are a couple of other features/issues that the potential reader should probably be aware of:
1) While the book introduces canonical quantization, it develops most of the material through the path integral formulation
2) Srednicki develops spinor algebra using two-component Weyl spinors, which in my opinion is more elegant and useful for studying SUSY (but which may bother those who are used to the 4-component Dirac notation)
3) The material is presentated through a large number of short (usually 3-4 page) chapters, which allows the author to cover a lot, but not always in great detail. Therefore (as with any QFT text), I would recommend supplementing the sections of this book with other texts (personally, I found Srednicki's informal approach complemented Weinberg's texts well)