I have been trying to learn some string phenomenology, but this was not easy because I did not know any phenomenology. Thats how I ended up looking at Dine's book, which seems to be the only book around that comes close to being an "Introduction to Phenomenology".

I was suspicious at first because the book is not that fat and the back-cover claimed to cover pretty much everything that one calls high-energy theory. But there is a method that Dine adopts to do this, which is to focus on techniques and derivations only when they are useful for the general line of ideas that he pursues. When they are tangential he just quotes the results (the pradigmatic example is the presentation of N=1, D=4 supergravity). This does NOT mean that the book is a compendium of formulas, far from that. What he focuses on is precisely what is needed to get you up to speed with the current state of the art in "phenomenology" and the physical motivations are clear throughout. I had always thought of phenomenology as a jungle of arbitrary and detailed quick-fixes which was one reason why I always avoided it. After reading the book... ummm... I still think that impression has truth in it, but now I also know that there is a lot of method behind the madness and some of it is in fact quite beautiful.

Prerequisites: you need to know QFT, but things like anomalies, instantons, monopoles etc. are covered in the book.

Flux compactifications are not discussed, but I guess that is a lot of extra material and deserves a separate review. To anyone interested in
that, I recommend Denef's Les Houches lctures which are up on the arXiv.

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