Introduction to High Energy Physics

Introduction to High Energy Physics

I'm using Perkins for a course mainly made up of senior undergraduates. First of all, a lot of the other reviewers have ripped the book to shreds, and most of their complaints are valid. I'd like to point out that this book actually attempts a fairly difficult task of introducing relatively advanced concepts which require qft, to students without any background in field theory.
The long and the short of it is... Perkins' book is geared for learning with a phenomonological, experimental approach. This results in a lot of hand waving, and not many mathematical or theoretical insights. If you're expecting these things, the book will be dissapointing.
All of this aside, there are some major flaws in the book. First of all, it kind of lacks on organization. There are a lot of charts, tables and graphs thrown about at random, and with little reasoning or thought. This makes Perkins' fairly useless as a reference, since you might have to look at four or more different charts to find out the relevant properties of a given particle.
My other major complaint, is that Perkins uses a lot of jargon without sufficiently introducing the terminology. While, this is fine for people who already know particle physics, I'm guessing that if you're reading this book, you don't already know particle physics.
Finally, despite being a fourth addition, there are still a bunch of misprints/omissions. For example, there's a question (which i conveniently had for a homework assignment) totally based on a concept not mentioned anywhere within the book. Google searches on the topic led only to obscure and inaccessible papers.
Basically, if you have to use this book for a course be prepared to read and re-read each section of it, and to suppliment with other books. I'd suggest buying griffiths along with it, event if you're not into the whole theory thing.