A First Course in String Theory

This book details with amazing clarity the basic concepts to acquire to start learning about the String theory and wanting to deepen it in graduate programs.

The goal of bringing the string theory to undergraduates is ambitious. I would think that it is rather successful taking into account a complexity of the subject. It is a good introduction to this subject and helps for further reading.

I approached this book in two parts. First, I went through the first half of the book which is about Physics in various dimensions like Very Special Relativity, Electromagnetism and Gravity., The it passes to the mechanics of the relativistic classical particle, its quantization, the mechanics of classical string and finally their quantization. The author works in the Light-cone gauge formalism and uses the Nambu-Goto action of the string. A good overview of the main facts about the bosonic string is given through out the following chapters, the first half or first part of this book ends on chapter 14 with an introduction to Superstrings. Then I jumped straight to the last two chapters 24 and 25 which are about string interactions and Riemann surfaces and Loop amplitudes in string theory. Here I must point out that he only does the stuff for open strings, I guess because the theory for Riemann surfaces and therefore tree and one loop amplitudes for closed strings is more involved mathematically. But it was nice to see in working action the Schwarz -Christoffel conformal mapping. Then I left this book for a while and only after going through several more books on the subject decided to came back on it for the second part which is called "Developments". Now for this part it is also the best and probably the only accesible introduction to the subject of D-branes, string charges, Non-linear Dirac - Born - Infeld electrodynamics and it even has a chapter which I am about to finish now that makes the contact between string phenomenology and the particle content of the Standard Model (SM) of particle physics which is not easy at all, using the so called or at least he calls them Brane color which when 3 of them together generate U(3)=SU(3)xU(1) gauge fields, the gluons, that couple to one of the open strings end which represent the quarks and 2 left branes together generate the U(2)=SU(2)xU(1) gauge group of the electroweak part of the SM. This is the INTRODUCTION you MUST go through in order to begin to understand D-branes, it also touches on T-duality and the AdS/CFT correspondence, the book is like his author professor Barton Zwiebach at the MIT, simply brilliant!

The book ties extremely well String Theory with the rest of (relevant) Physics !
String Theories logical link with the rest of Physics is a big reason for the huge number of Particle Physicist (and the like) who strongly believe String Theory is on the right track to unify physics interactions.
Starting with gravitation and all the way to strong interactions. (This is what people euphemistically call Theory of Everything)
Unlike other authors Prof. Zwiebach is not out to "SNOW" the reader!
Instead his approach identifies a near optimal path (Least Action Principle , shall we say) to an (awesomely) accurate and exciting overview of the subject for the aspiring student.
I was also extremely impressed by Prof. Zwiebach's success at covering quite advanced subjects, such as Branes, AdS/ CFT duality and Calabai/Yau spaces.