Which QFT Textbook is Recommended by Scientists?

[Chopin]

This is probably a holy-war sort of subject, but I'm curious if there is any sort of consensus on the board. I've been trying to teach myself some basic QFT, so far just by scrounging together what I can find online. I've primarily been reading Srednicki, since it's easily accessible for free, but I've been growing less and less satisfied with it as I get further in. Google Books has a chunk of Peskin and Schroeder available, and it looks pretty good so far. If I wanted to buy a single text on QFT, would that be a good one to go for? Or does anybody have any other recommendations I ought to look into?

 

[Haelfix]

The question is unanswerable unless you state your purpose, and what is your existing background?

For students interested in high energy physics and who have had a semesters worth of quantum mechanics. I would say the following sequence:

Griffith 'introductions to elementary particles" (do some of the homeworks)
then
A. Zee 'QFT in a nutshell' (read it, but don't do the homeworks, its great for the intuition and ability to get used to the jargon). Its like what the Feynman lectures are for quantum mechanics. Great to really understand the essence of the physics, but less good to actually do any real calculations. I think I read it start to finish in like 2 days, so fascinated I was with the material and Tony's presentation.
then
Peskin and Shroeder or Srednicki.. Pick one or the other. This is the nuts and bolts of QFT and you need to do the calculations and the homework. Once you have done this, you have the base of QFT down.

At this point, if you've really done all of that carefully, you probably know what to look for and where to find it.

 

[Daverz]

We had a QFT thread just a few days ago:

https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=452223

Here are some nice notes (thru QED) using a "traditional" canonical quantization approach:

http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/tong/qft.html

He links to some other good stuff there as well.