The writing  in the book's first half is what you would expect from an advanced engineering text. It is painfully cryptic and emphasizes results over theory. It invokes plenty of advanced math, but you don't really need to understand it. All you need are the results, and if you have an engineer's mentality, you will be fine with that. A lot of the results are quite sophisticated, and the treatment is very modern—fundamental theorem of asset pricing stuff instead of partial differential equations. But results aren't tied together into any sort of unifying whole. This isn't the sort of book you will enjoy reading from cover to cover, but it is useful for making you aware of some sophisticated concepts.

There are four chapters in this first part of the book, and they are each quite long. They are poorly organized and sort of meander through topics. Several times, the authors will invoke a concept and assure you they will explain it later.

The four chapters cover:

basic pricing theory

fixed income pricing theory

advanced pricing theory

financial risk management.

The projects in the last third of the book touch on a variety of theoretical and practical topics in financial engineering and risk management. The goal is to get readers to actually develop software as they might on the job. The projects are an integral part of the book. Indeed, readers may want to read the book by performing the projects one by one and only referring to the first part of the book on an as-needed basis.

The appeal of this book is the fact that it really gets readers coding applications, which is something most financial engineering texts fail to do. If you take this book on, I think you will be amply rewarded for the effort. You will probably want to supplement with a couple good theoretical financial engineering texts. A copy of Jackson and Staunton (2001) will also help with the projects. [10/16/05]