M. Salem

Good but could be better, Jun 30 2004

I used P&S for an intro QFT course. I learned much from the text as I found it clear and full of helpful examples. Particularly nice sections were those introducing free quantum fields, functional methods (path integrals), and non-abelian gauge theories and their quantization. In other sections, however, P&S often take many pages and indirect paths towards deriving basic results, which is particularly frustrating when one wishes to use the text for reference. The chapter introducing interacting fields seems disorganized, and the treatments of infrared and uv divergences (renormalization) seem to go on forever, with interesting or important results scattered through hundreds of… Read more

Good, Jun 25 2004

I used this text for a course after taking an undergraduate GR course based on Shutz. I found Shutz to be a much clearer and pedagogical text, and don't think I would have learned GR as easily if I had started with Wald. I think one requires greater mathematical preparation than I possess to fully appreciate the discussions involving topology in the second chapter and appendix. Oddly, however, this text becomes clearer as the reader advances through it: later chapters were more straightforward and still concise.

Great text, Jun 24 2004

I haven't used another cosmology text for comparison, but have been very pleased with this one. The text is everywhere clear, reasonably concise, and the author uses good judgment in determining which calculations to present as examples and which to reserve for practice, all of which make this a very easy text to read. My only reservations are that necessary assumptions and approximations do not always seem fully justified, and the reader is often asked to wait until later in the text for certain approximations to be justified, which at times disrupts the logical flow of the text. The text is also somewhat incomplete in the sense that Dodelson does not always start from first principles… Read more