A First Course in String Theory

"Yes. This is a book by my MIT colleague Barton Zwiebach, and it grew out of a year-long course that he taught at MIT for undergraduates who wanted to learn string theory. So he goes through a lot of the material that the Green, Schwarz, Witten and Polchinski books cover at a more detailed level. He does it without any claims of completeness, but you really do get the idea. I remember when I learned string theory myself, the thing that was hard was that you seemed to have to learn every idea three or four times over, because everything had been thrashed out with different methods, by different groups, in competition with one another, and to get the whole picture you had to absorb so much. Zwiebach’s achievement here is that he found a pretty short and direct path through the centre of the subject that really makes it more accessible. I think that’s fair. Or at least students with a strong science background and good knowledge of calculus. For instance, one of his chapters is ‘A Brief Review of Lagrangian Mechanics’, which is a very challenging topic, having to do with multi-variable calculus. So you definitely have to be on your toes to get the full substance of parts of Zwiebach’s book. But of all the books I’ve mentioned, this one is the most direct route into the heart of the subject."