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Rating: 
Summary: A great introduction to supersymmetry and string theory
Review: Bailin & Love is a really great book to begin learning supersymmetry from. I read this book while simultaneously reading the first few chapters of Wess & Bagger's susy and sugra text. Much of the detailed calculation and attention to details is missing in B&L and can be found in more sophisticated texts (such as Wess & Bagger and the Weinberg text). I found B&L a good place for wordy explanations which are sorely lacking in W&B. B&L also does a good job of connecting susy to phenomenology by introducing the minimally supersymmetric standard model. The susy in B&L is done in four-component notation to make it more familiar with QED and electroweak calculations. On top of this, all of the calculations are done with component fields; superfields are used only for organization. No formalism of supergraphs is used. Supergravity is also introduced, once again in a more wordy fashion than W&B. Apparently, much of the susy phenomenology is similar to the "Supersymmetry Primer" article by Stephen Martin.... String theory in Bailin & Love is done in a similar fashion as the susy: lots of words without the messy calculation. B&L don't bother with conformal field theory at all and use basically the "old covariant quantization". Once again though, B&L is a great thing to be reading as a companion to Green Schwarz Witten or as a companion to Polchinski. In the end, Bailin & Love is a great place to begin learning about supersymmetry and string theory. I read it after a year of quantum field theory and found it very quick and easy to read. Bailin & Love does a good job of getting the reader in a good position to read the more advanced texts (Wess & Bagger, Weinberg for susy and GSW and Polchinski for strings). Unfortunately, there are many typos in the equations. Corrections can be found at the author's page ...
Rating: 
Summary: Intersting observations for the hard physics
Review: I really enjoyed the observations of professor Bailin about gauge theory, which is quite useful in the field of submoleculer physics and wave theory. However, his writing is quite scientific, which is to be expected in this type of field, but if particle physics floats your boat, then this would be a good book to buy.
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