September 20th, 2008, 11:40 pm
QuoteOriginally posted by: PaulTJ, that's really just people being even more sheep-like than usual!barny, they do warn in the book's publicity that you'll either love it or hate it! The definition of 'beginners' includes knowledge of calculus, depending on the level of your maths you might think things are skipped when others wouldn't. If I give an 'advanced' course these days I find that a lot of people attend have what I would call very mediocre skills. This wasn't the case a decade ago. This is unfortunate for everyone concerned. But then that's not just quant finance that's education in the west. If you are struggling, barny, then read some of the Schaum books. If you PM me I can give you a list. I can help you get through my terrible book! (BTW you'll probably hate the three-volume PWOQF2 even more!)PHehe thank you Paul, really though I'm not as terrible a Mathematician as you make me out to be. I don't have a problem following the Math, I just think in some parts of the book you say something which to you is completely obvious but to a complete newcomer/layman to finance isn't, and that your explanations sometimes get a little confusing, particularly the order in which you've explained things. As a Physicist/Mathematician I'm used to seeing an overall statement/theorem and then explaining the bits of that to arrive back at the theorem, sometimes you just explain the bits and have the theorem at the end. This makes it exceptionally hard to follow because you have no idea where each of the little bits are going or what they mean! At least that's what happened to me. Really though the book is not bad, my review was perhaps a little harsh and I didn't qualify it properly - if you are intending to learn quant finance from scratch with no previous knowledge and you're only using Paul Wilmott introduces Derivatives and no other books, then I think it is a bad book for that purpose, and the fact that the book touts itself as "The perfect introduction" is I think, misleading. If you however use the book in conjunction with some other books(Hull, for example) then actually I think it is a good complement, and shows you a different side to derivatives to that of Hull for example. In any event, there is definitely lots of useful things to learn in your book that aren't covered as well in other books, and for only £30, it is a worthwhile addition to your bookshelf.
Last edited by
barny on September 20th, 2008, 10:00 pm, edited 1 time in total.