Customer Reviews

String Theory in a Nutshell

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I have mixed feelings about this book. Let me start off by saying that despite the title of the book, this book is NOT written in the style of "Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell", which is the masterpiece by A. Zee. I eagerly awaited the release of String Theory in a Nutshell thinking finally here is a string theory book mere mortals can understand. Unfortunatly, the presentation is quite a bit more rigorous and terse than QFT in a Nutshell, so I don't think it lives up to its name. In fact if I hadn't been reading other string theory books at the same time, I would have found this book incredibly terse and hard to get through. Results are simply stated without any how or why behind them. This is in complete contrast to Becker, Becker & Schwarz say, where they have detailed calculations laid out for you.

OK that all sounds negative. The other side of my review is that if you have had some exposure to string theory, the book is fairly well written. So what's my conclusion? If you're looking to learn string theory for the first time, which this book seems to claim to be able to do by the name of it, you're going to be really disappointed. Like I said above this ain't A. Zee's book (which is an example of what a book in this series should look like). On the other hand, if you're looking for a reference to keep on your shelf, its good to have.

So i have to admit one thing: i was lucky enough to go to kiritsis's lectures at ENS where he handed out some prepublication versions of this book but i havent read the final version.

That said, his lectures were infinitely more clear to me than my attempts at digesting polchinski which i always found took time enough to try my patience. I found the calculations here detailed enough to follow, and i find that research papers suddenly made sense after reading his stuff. The level is similar to that of D-branes by johnson.