Reddit reviews Quarks and Leptons: An Introductory Course in Modern Particle Physics

I would recommend Introduction to "Elementary Particle Physics" by David Griffiths

Its generally considered a higher-level undergrad book, but as a PhD student I still look at it from time to time, especially if I want to teach a specific subject. He will review the SR and Quantum for you, but at a level that you'd want to have seen it before. There's calc and a little bit of linear algebra, but at such a level that you could learn them for the first time through this text (assuming you've had SOME Calc before)

From there, the next level is sort of "Quarks and Leptons" by Halzen and Martin, which people are generally less excited about, but I enjoyed it.

After that, the top standard that even theorists seem to love is "High Energy Hadron Physics" by Martin Perl, where there are parts of that text that I still struggle with.

In addition to the other recommendations that have been made: Halzen and Martin goes through electroweak symmetry breaking and the Higgs mechanism in chapter 14, and the Weinberg-Salam model (this is the real deal) in chapter 15. Depending on how much QFT you're familiar with, you can probably skip lots of the content preceding those chapters.

This is the kind of book that's going to be difficult to work through, but in my experience, it's worth the effort.

There's Griffiths and Halzen and Martin which are suitable for undergraduates. They'll teach you how to calculate scattering amplitudes and some phenomenology and stuff like that. Anything more complicated than that would probably require a QFT book, in which case I would recommend Peskin and Schroeder. Ironically, I feel like you would learn QED way better with P&S than any other typical standard model book.

Most of your questions can be answered by reading a text such as Quarks and Leptons. Chapters 13 and 14 go through the structure of the Standard Model Lagrangian. You can also use a program like MadGraph to compute scattering amplitudes and Feynman diagrams.

Here are some books I would suggest looking at:

Cahn and Goldhaber -- A very low math book that documents the discoveries many of the most important advancements in particle physics of the last fifty or so years.

Halzen and Martin -- One of the best introductions to particle physics out there. It's very readable and timeless. It does have some math though.

I would also suggest looking for information on the following things, but I don't have time to dig up suitable references for you:

The construction of Fermilab basically transformed the area west of Chicago from farmland to a technical corridor. There must be some historical sources on this change.

Partice physicists have produced a huge amount of innovation as a side effect of wanting to do effective research. The most common example is the internet. They also pioneered distributed computing (ie the Grid) which was the predecessor of the "Cloud." For the construction the LHC, junctions that allow current to be continuously passed from regular-conduction to super-conducting circuits were invented. And don't forget that one of the earliest particle accelerators, the cyclotron in Chicago, showed that it was possible to split the atom.