D-Branes

Rating:
Summary: A very good introduction
Review: I haven't read this book in any great detail, but I have read certain sections of it, and leafed through the entire content. I think this is a very good introduction to certain aspects of string theory with an emphasis on D-branes. There is no way that any single textbook can cover the entire theory, starting from the oscillator formalism, and all the way to the most recent developments. The subject is simply too enormous for that.

This book is a highly commendable effort by the author. We need more such books.

Rating:
Summary: Really Useful!
Review: This is the book I was waiting for. I know some string theory before, and this got me back into it fast, and then on to D-branes and supergravity and things like that. String duality and D-brane black holes is what I wanted to know more about and it is introduce and explained just great! And there is lots of discussion and other explanation of many other topics. The book is good at connecting many topics together in a useful way.

Rating:
Summary: Great book... once all the errors are corrected.
Review: While it provides a (in some sense) self-contained introduction to string theory, it is no secret that this was not the intended focus of this text (as indicated even by its title), so prior knowledge of string theory would be highly beneficial. It does however provide a novel viewpoint from which it introduces string theory, and it is so far the best/only text on D-Branes, which is a subject that has become vitally entangled with string theory, so it is worth reading for anyone in the field.

Unfortunately, the deal-breaker is that there are many non-trivial errors throughout the text, which makes it difficult to be sure you understand what you think you are learning. A positive outlook comes from the fact that the author has an errata webpage where errors are being collected, so maybe there will be a future printing with most errors corrected that would deserve 4 or 5 stars.