Quantum Field Theory Demystified,   ISBN:9780071543828

Customer Rating: 

By reading this book alone, you will not master 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! This helpful little book cuts straight to the important material. It is very much like an outline of basic quantum field theory, so the more you know all around (i.e. from lectures, other books, etc) the more use you will get from this book. I would especially recommend this book to anyone trying to self-study quantum field theory.

Customer Rating: 

"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. The weakness of this book, which is its biggest disappointment, is that it lacks the development of a solid mental model of QFT. 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. QFT Demystified helps with the former and falls short with the later.

Customer Rating: 

This book has been reviewed for content by several others. 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. I strongly suggest you do not buy the Kindle version. The conversion from the book to the Kindle format was obviously made without ever looking at the result! 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. 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. 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. appear as boxed question marks. 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.

Customer Rating: 

This is not the first book from which I try to completely understand QFT. 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. Unfortunately, this book doesn't quite fit the bill. The reasons:

1. The connection between the Lagrangians and the Feynman rules is unclear (for instance, there is nothing mentioned about the Wick's theorem).

2. There is essentially nothing about the divergences and renormalization.

The reasons, why I don't criticize this book more harshly, are:

1. 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". 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 !).

2. 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. well established, physical theories, don't expect any "silver bullet" here. There is no such a bullet!

Customer Rating: 

When I was first trying to learn Quantum Field Theory (QFT), at the end of my college years and at the beginning of the graduate schools, the jump from the "regular" quantum mechanics seemed almost insurmountable. Even with a full year of graduate quantum mechanics, the kinds of concepts and calculations that are the staple of the QFT seemed beyond anything that I had encountered in Physics before. Unfortunately to this day there aren't many QFT textbooks that will give you the benefit of the doubt when first learning the subject. Most of them aim to be comprehensive, rather than pedagogical. Which is unfortunate because many more basic concepts and results are not beyond the ability of a more motivated undergraduate to grasp. In the light of that, I wish that David McMahon's book had been published earlier. There clearly is a need for book of this type, for both those who are interested in preparing themselves for a full-fledged course on QFT, as well for many practicing Physicist who could benefit from knowing the bare essentials of QFT for their own line of research (particle physicists, astrophysicists, etc.). As correctly pointed out by other reviewers, the book has its flaws. The ones that I find particularly prominent are 1. Many mistakes, 2. It can be conceptually fuzzy and less than accurate when it comes to some key concepts. 3. Non-inclusion of non-relativistic QFT (important for condensed matter applications) 4. Inclusion of Supersymmetry, which is a non-standard topic for most textbooks, and not even a verified concept, and 5. Poor typesetting. However, even with those flaws, the book is an important text for everyone who is interested in learning about QFT on their own for the first time. But it is not meant for everyone: one year of college-level quantum mechanics and familiarity with the modern tensor notation would be the minimal requirement s for taking a fool advantage of this book.