A Google user
All things considered, this book is excellent. The author states in the introduction that his goal is actually to teach math, not really physics so much, and as long as you get that it's a great read. If you are expecting to get a detailed "physicsey" explanation of particle physics though you'll be pretty disappointed.
However, as far as it is a math book, it's not the typical theorem/proof format that mathematicians use. The author is clearly a physicist (not a mathematician) because while he's largely explaining math it reads more like physics, with derivations and lots of intuitive explanations of things.
The first chapter is a nice summary of basic ideas. The sections on Lagrangians and variational stuff is one of the clearest I've seen, with really nice explanations of what's going on with actions. The special relativity part is really good too - does a nice job of taking an undergraduate understanding of SR and setting up for the more advanced ways of looking at it he gets to in later chaps.
The second chapter is mostly a high level summary of all particle physics - it's called "Experimentalist's Perspective", but it doesn't go into how particle physics experiments are done. Just a summary of all the big ideas (leptons, hadrons, 4 forces, and so on). It seems a little out of place for a book mostly on math topics, but it is very well written.
The third and fourth chapters are really what make this book great. The third is an introduction to group theory, starting with normal group theory, then lie groups, and then the Lorentz group, which is a Lie group way of looking at special relativity. All three parts are definitely the best summary I've ever seen. He talks about the groups relevant to particles/quantum in so much detail that it would be difficult not to be comfortable with them at the end. The last section on the Lorentz group is really incredible too - I've banged my head against the wall with quantum field theory books trying to understand all the spinor details many times, and he makes it all crystal clear in about 20 pages.
The fourth chapter then finally gets into some physics. He doesn't do much with spin 0 because there isn't much to say if you're not going to do cross sections and decay rates and stuff, but he just solves Klein Gordon.
The section on spin 1/2, however, is one of the best parts of any physics book I've read. He takes almost all the math/physics he's done up till then and explains Fermions more clearly than any other reference I've found. Clifford algebras, parity, different types of spinors, the Dirac equation, even a really nifty way to geometrically think about spin - all perfectly clear. The book is worth reading for that section alone.
He then does spin 1 fields, devoting strangely little time to them, but it's enough.
Then he explains gauge theory in a really nice. Once again, it is very easy to understand what's going on, but he doesn't dig in to all the mathematical details he could have with the math of gauge theory.
The quantization section is nice - doesn't really go into the math of quantization though. The book starts to read more like a physics book at this point. The explanations of what's going on with the different quantization schemes is really well written, and he gives a lot of intuition for what path integrals are doing. But he seems to start focusing on explaining the ideas behind the physics and less on the details of what the math is doing.
The end of chapter 4 is a summary of the standard model along with some quaint explanations of things like the Higgs mechanism and symmetry breaking.
The fifth chapter seems to largely leave behind explaining math and summarizes some of the ideas in cutting edge topics like quantum gravity. There is a nice overview of SU(5), but he mostly discusses ideas.
Again, all things considered this books is great.
