Milan M. Cirkovic, President of the Serbian Astronomical Society in Foundations of Physics
Modern Cosmology is ... a textbook intended for advanced undergraduate and beginning graduate students in physics and astronomy. However, it is much more than that -- it is a pioneering endeavor, the first true XXI century cosmological reference book. Read the whole review

Prof. Paul Framton, University of North Carolina in CERN Courier
Modern Cosmology by Scott Dodelson is intended for beginning graduate students. This book is very up to date and gives excellent treatments of structure formation, and especially of the CMB, including its polarization and details of its statistical analysis. This provides what is the most complete such description in any textbook. The topic of weak gravitational lensing is also handled well. The young author is an active researcher in theoretical cosmology whose enthusiasm for the subject is evident throughout, and whose selection of topics reflects his areas of greatest expertise. The inclusion of many worked examples will make this book a very good choice for a graduate course.

For researchers, the treatment of data analysis will be particularly valuable. For both CMB, from WMAP and the future more data intensive Planck mission, and for LSS from the Sloan Digital Sky and 2dF surveys, as well as even larger galaxy surveys in the future, the quality and quantity of the raw data set are such that straightforward algorithms are too slow even with the fastest available computers. Thus considerable creativity and intelligence are needed to optimize such an analysis. It is interesting that a similar situation must exist for raw data from high-energy particle colliders such as from the Tevatron at Fermilab and the future LHC collider at CERN. It is therefore very welcome that, for both CMB and galaxy surveys, Dodelson leads us masterfully through the likelihood function and sophisticated mathematical techniques for its evaluation ...

Prof. B. R. Parker, Idaho State University in Choice Magazine
Dodelson (Univ. of Chicago) offers this comprehensive work on modern cosmology directed toward students in physics or astronomy. All areas of cosmology are discussed in considerable mathematical detail. The book is more comprehensive than most similar books on the market, e.g., Andrew R. Liddle's An Introduction to Modern Cosmology (CH, Oct'99). A considerable amount of relativity is included, and students would have to be familiar with tensor analysis. There are a large number of exercises at the ends of the chapters, with solutions to selected exercises at the end of the book. Anyone working through all these exercises would be well equipped to work in the area. The chapters on gravitational lensing and gravitational waves are particularly interesting, but the author also does a good job on inflation theory and the theory of the early universe. His discussion of the early universe, however, is not as extensive as Edward W. Kolb and Michael S. Turner's in The Early Universe (1990). Dodelson's book is well illustrated with both line diagrams and photos.
Summing Up: Highly recommended . Graduate students serious about cosmology; faculty and researchers.

A reader from amazon (not related to me!) I stumbled across the title of this book when I was browsing around somebody's cosmology course website. I know that Scott Dodelson is a quite well-known cosmologist, so I start searching for more information. After reading the preliminary detailed table of contents (I found it somewhere on the web) and the book description from Academic Press, I decided to pre-order the book. The book arrived just on March 31. I tried to take a quick but thorough view before write this comment. I haven't read the book in full. Here i would just like to write the Table of Contents in more detail by including the sections.
1. The Standard Model and Beyond. The expanding universe, Hubble diagram, Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN), Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), beyond Standard Cosmology (SC).
2. The Smooth, Expanding Universe. General relativity (crash course), distances, evolution of energy, cosmic inventory (photons, baryons, matter, neutrinos, dark energy, epoch of matter-radiation equality).
3. Beyond Equilibrium. Boltzmann equation for annihilation, BBN (neutron & light elements abudance), recombination, dark matter.
4. The Boltzmann Equations (BE). BE for harmonic oscillator, the collisionless BE for photons (0th and 1st order), collision terms: Compton scattering, BE for photons, BE for Cold Dark Matter (CDM), BE for baryons.
5. Einstein Equations. Perturbed Ricci tensor and scalar, two components of Einstein Equations, tensor perturbations, decomposition theorems, gauges.
6. Initial conditions. Einstein-Boltzmann equations at early times, the horizon, inflation, gravity wave production, scalar perturbations.
7. Inhomogeneities. Prelude, large scales (super-horizon & through horizon crossing), small scales (horizon & sub-horizon crossing), growth function, beyond CDM.
8. Anisotropies. Overview, large-scale anisotropies, acoustic oscillations (tightly coupled), diffusion (Silk) damping, inhomogeneities to anisotropies (free streaming, C_{l}s), anisotropy spectrum (Sachs-Wolfe, small scales), cosmological parameters.
9. Probe of Inhomogeneities. Angular correlation, peculiar velocities, redshift space distortions, galaxy clusters.
10. Weak Lensing and Polarization. Gravitational distortion, geodesics and shears, ellipticity, weak lensing power spectrum, polarization, quadrupole and Q/U (or should it be E/B as Seljak-Zaldarriaga definition ?) decomposition, polarization power spectra, detection of gravity waves.
11. Analysis. Likelihood function, signal covariance matrix, Karhunen-Loeve & optimal quadratic, Fisher matrix, mapmaking & inversion, systematics, foregrounds.
Appendix A. Solution to Selected Problems Appendix B. Numbers Appendix C. Special Functions Appendix D. Symbols. Bibliography.
In addition, each chapter is ended with a summary and further reading list. Quite nice indeed. The bibliography are extensive and includes classic, pioneering papers, recent papers, summer schools notes, and textbooks. There are some color plates in the middle part of the book.
In my opinion, this book is far better than Peacock in discussing new aspect of anisotropies and inhomogeneities. Lots of topics that were only previously available in research papers, review articles, summer school lectures, preprints, are brought together to the form of a decent book. The chapter of analysis is quite interesting, since the subject has become very demanding but there are still no single concise, compact, introductory treatment of it.
Dodelson said in the preface that the expected audience are advanced undergraduate and beginning graduate students. Some of the necessary materials (GR, inflation) are introduced in the text.
I myself suggests, however, that the reader should have a proficient knowledge in standard undergraduate physics (mechanics, thermodynamics/kinetic theory, electromagnetism, quantum physics), mathematical physics, and general relativity if possible. Some knowledge of astrophysics/astronomy, statistics/data analysis, kinetic theory, would certainly be welcomed.
This book is a must buy for all professors, researchers, and students of cosmology, and I believe it will be so.