Cosmological Inflation and Large-Scale Structure

Rating:
Summary: A mess of a book, but still very useful.
Review: This book is a total mess. Lots of errors in the equations. The notation is somehow inconsistent. The authors switch between regular time and conformal time, Fourier series and integrals, etc. Instead of progressing in order, the authors cover the subject in a back-and-forth way that drives me crazy! Still this is very useful compendium of information on Inflationary Theory, at a graduate to professional level. A future edition, more up-to-date, with the errors corrected and a more consistent notation would be a masterpiece. Provided Inflation withstands the test of time (it is doing fine for now!)

Five stars because of the reasonable price!

Rating:
Summary: Concise, modern and lucid: pretty good
Review: This is a nice book that introduces all of the basic material for inflation. I found that most of it can be found elsewhere (eg. in Peacock's book), and it isn't necessarily any more comprehensive in Liddle & Lyth, because the pace of exposition is slow. However, it's worth buying for the insights the authors give, for the careful treatment of cosmological perturbation theory and gauge choice, and because it is approached from an explicitly supersymmetric direction. (There is no technical information about supersymmetry, however, and if you are after a book on supersymmetric cosmology, then you will have to look elsewhere. I think Peter D'Eath has a book of this sort, published by CUP.) There is a "beyond the slow roll approximation" section, which is good, and the chapter of inflationary model building is the best I have seen.The level of mathematics is pretty much nil, anyone with basic algebra could cope. Other points of interest are that (1) the authors develop all spectra (power spectrum, spectrum of tensor perturbations etc.) from what they call the "curvature perturbation", which is new to me, although there's absolutely nothing at all wrong with it, (2) the section on large-scale structure (Press-Schecter et. al.) which is included, and (3) the fact that the bibliography gives eprint numbers for the quoted papers. A minor downside is a small amount of forward referencing. It's concise, modern and lucid, and the website has up-to-date info. Excellent.