It has been almost five years since I finished writing the first edition of A First Course in String Theory. I have since taught the undergraduate string theory course at MIT three times, and I have received comments and suggestions from colleagues all over the world. I have learned what parts of the book are most challenging for the students, and I have heard requests for extra material.
As in the first edition, the book is broadly divided into Part I (Basics) and Part II (Developments). In this second edition I have improved the clarity of many arguments and the general readability of Part I. This part is studied by the largest number of readers, many of them independently and outside of the classroom setting. The changes should make study easier. There are more figures and the number of problems has been increased to better cover the range of ideas developed in the text. Part I has five new sections and one new chapter. The new sections discuss the classical motion of closed strings, cosmic strings, and orbifolds. The new chapter, Chapter 14, is the last one of Part I. It explains the basics of superstring theory.
Part II has changed as well. The ordering of chapters has been altered to bring T-duality earlier into the book. The material relevant to particle physics has been collected in Chapter 21 and includes a new section on moduli stabilization and the landscape.
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