# Which QFT book is better? Peskin & Shroder or Weinberg?

1. Jul 12, 2010

### petergreat

The title is my question. What are the relative merits of the two books? I've only read part of Peskin & Schroder, and one of my complaints is that the book doesn't cover canonical quantization of QED which I need for my course. I don't know much about Weinberg's book, but it seems to be have more in-depth discussions.

2. Jul 16, 2010

### Fredrik

Staff Emeritus
Weinberg's approach is very different. He starts with a discussion of the general principles of QM and SR, and how combining the two leads to the concept of non-interacting particles. Then he starts talking about creation/annihilation operators and how to combine them into quantum fields. Those fields are used to define interactions. When he derives the Feynman rules for an arbitrary QFT with interactions, he still hasn't said anything about canonical quantization. I think that doesn't appear until chapter 7.

If you need a book that's a lot like P&S, you might want to consider Mandl & Shaw. Other popular choices are Srednicki, and Zee. The latter starts with the path integral approach right away.

Last edited: Jul 16, 2010
3. Jul 16, 2010

### Daverz

I think Srednicki might make a good text if supplemented with, say, the Itzykson & Zuber (inexepensive Dover edition) for background reading.