I come from a theoretical/economics background and am trying to learn a bit more about the practical stuff people on the Street care about, esp. credit risk. I thought the book by Duffie and Singleton will be a good introduction but it has terrible reviews on Amazon. Is it worth buying? I would appreciate some input from experienced credit quants and traders here. Duffie's textbook on Dynamic Asset Pricing is a classic and I enjoyed learning from it, although it is too terse. I also really like Singleton's new treatise on financial econometrics. Can their joint work be so bad?

I basically agree with those Amazon reviews on this book. It's like an incomplete summary of their articles. But if you read the credit risk chapter in Duffie's latest edition of Dynamic Asset Pricing Theory, this book may be a decent introduction to their credit risk researches. But you will want to read their original papers instead.

That is what I gathered from the reviews - the original articles are better. Thank you.