Rating: 
Summary: The best modern text on quantum field theory
Review: A balanced, comprehensive and pedagogical text on quantum field theory. I highly recommend it, especially to beginners, who may prefer it to Brown (highly technical and sometimes obscure if one doesn't know the subject already) and Weinberg (encyclopedic and masterful but very dense). It is divided into three parts. Part I deals with foundations and explores QED in a self-contained manner, and is very helpful in connecting the reader familiar with quantum mechanics to field theoretic ideas, including calculating with Feynman diagrams. Part II is an introduction to modern techniques, including the path integral formalism, renormalization group and connection to statistical mechanics. Part III discusses the Standard Model of particle physics, including QCD and asymptotic freedom, the Weinberg-Salam electroweak theory, and anomalies.
Rating:
Summary: Easily the best field theory text available
Review: A superb intermediate level field theory text. One of the few texts I have encountered that can (and should perhaps) be read sequentially. The presentation of the modern Wilsonian view of renormalization, and effective field theories is especially superb. The calculational detail and accompanying discussion at every step is near perfect IMHO, and the book is tied together in almost a narrative style! A must have in every physicist's collection.
Rating:
Summary: Good Book, but Mathematically...
Review: I always wonder why physists won't hesitate to take hermitian conjugates of operators on complex vector space. In this book the barred spinor fields are defined as daggered fields multiplied by gamma^0, but taking conjugate using the standard inner products between Dirac spinors naturally leads to the barred fields. Don't they worry whether using "apparently" coordinate-dependent expression results in something wrong?
Rating: 
Summary: Poor Presentation, Lack of Depth
Review: I can only imagine that those reviewers who sing and dance over this book have never had a serious look at Itzykson & Zuber's text on quantum field theory, which is incomparibly clearer in its presentation, much better organized and gives fuller, deeper treatment of the subjects. P&S spend almost 100 pages describing renomalization and in the end prove nothing. It suffers from a terrible lack of foundations of QFT and their discussions often lapse into worthless gibberish. The authors simply don't demonstrate a clear understanding of the principles of the subject and have cooked up a hodge-podge of this and that. Get Streater and Wightman's book "PCT, Spin ..." for a rigorous treatment of the basics of QFT and learn the subject from I&Z.
Rating:
Summary: Don't Spend Too Much Time on P&S
Review: I can understand why many reviewers give this book a good review: its complete, approachable for anyone with a moderate background in QM, electrodynamics and mathematics, and it does a good job of teaching the reader how to calculate cross sections. However, I would not recommend this text to anyone looking for more than computational methods. It is not very readable and gives little to the reader in the way of illuminating the structure of quantum field theory beyond the mere technical aspects of the theory. A careful reading of the text is exacted at the expense of routine but lengthy calculations from one formula to the next. I find that the amount of effort expended at working through the text far exceeds the knowledge and insight obtained in return.
Rating:
Summary: This book is miserable!
Review: I consider myself to be a good physics student, I never had trouble with self study from books, if they were any good.
This book is, in my opinion, just awful.
The exposition of subjects is with no depth, most arguments are based on "physical intuition" that maybe professors, after many years, have - most of the time you simply don't understand why the Hell X implies Y like they say.
They just slap the formulas on the page, with simply not enough justification, using all sorts of "physically obvious" or "we can expect that this will be" arguments.
No depth, no depth, no depth.
Look in L. Brown's book, you will see a beautifull construction of a theory, that's they way it should look like.
Rating:
Summary: A modern classic
Review: I have used this book for the past five years, teaching a one
semester course on Intro to Quantum Field Theory.
I also taught the second half of the book two times.
I am still amazed by how well written and enlightening this book
is, and I regard it as a modern classic. After a years
worth of study, the student is really able to dive into research.
They know the Standard Model in enough detail to
perform radiative corrections in the electroweak model, and
where the Feynman rules come from in different gauges.
The book is accessible to experimental and theoretical students
in all areas of physics, and drives home all the essential
points. I wish this book had been around twenty years ago
when I was first trying to learn the material.
Rating: 
Summary: Good but could be better
Review: 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 pages. The discussion of the Standard Model is likewise overly verbose yet incomplete, and there is no discussion of susy. In this and other ways this text is less advanced than Ryder's, though I found its presentations clearer than Ryder's.Overall, I found this a nice book to learn from, but horrible to return to when I try to fill in the gaps of my understanding of QFT.
Rating:
Summary: Good but could be better
Review: 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 pages. The discussion of the Standard Model is likewise overly verbose yet incomplete, and there is no discussion of susy. In this and other ways this text is less advanced than Ryder's, though I found its presentations clearer than Ryder's. Overall, I found this a nice book to learn from, but horrible to return to when I try to fill in the gaps of my understanding of QFT.
Rating:
Summary: A good book on the calculational aspects of field theory
Review: I used this book for a year long quantum field theory course at Berkeley and feel that I learned a respectable amount from it. However, as the other reviews state, the book spends alot of time elucidating the details of the calculations in field theory while sacrificing pedagogical aspects. The little bit on representations of the Lorentz group is hardly enough to be satisfying. When I first went through this I was really wondering where in the world spinors came from (go to Pokorski's field theory text for this). Nonetheless, QED is done in a satisfying way, showing all the important calculations whose results are used throughout the text in the QCD and electroweak sections. Many sections of the book are not self contained at all. I wanted to learn about anomalies early on and found that the anomalies chapter could only be read after a thorough reading of all the QCD chapter (which is particularly phenomenological). The renormalization chapters are quite good, but it lacks a big-picture summary of how to go from measurable quantities to things like running coupling constants.
P&S do a good job of writing a very phenomenologically oriented field theory text. There are practically as many connections to experiment as you would find in a decent particle physics book. The formal structure of quantum field theory is not explored at all. Chapter 7 holds many formal results which are important for the rest of the book, however the chapter is particularly confusing. Functional integrals are explained but are not taken as the foundation upon which the QFT stands. I found the formal structure of QFT to be very well explained in Pokorski's text. In the end, Peskin is a pretty good book with which to start learning QFT. I have yet to find an introductory QFT text that I really like (I haven't checked out the Brown book). Peskin left me feeling like I knew how to do particle physics calculations correctly but I didn't really get a feel for how QFT as a logical framework fit together. After reading Peskin, one is comfortable enough with calculating in QFT to a degree that more sophisticated texts (Pokorski, Weinberg) are very accessible.
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