Paul Wilmott on Quantitative Finance 3 Volume Set (2nd Edition) 2nd Edition

I found this book quite interesting. Yes it may lack rigor in math but it gave me intuitions other books lack. As an engineer who has gone through rigorous derivations in graduate school and entered the work place finding that all these math isn't very useful and is easy to forget. The intuitions and deep understanding of the reasoning are the things that people remember forever. This is what this book is good at.

I tried to put 0 stars. This is overpriced and absolutely useless book.Author has absolutely no experience in practical application of quantitative finance. His descriptions of the models are outdated, the book provides zero intuition about what's happening in the markets.It's hard to imagine why somebody would spent time and money on this book.

I'm only through the first book of the set, and already can't wait to start the second one. This is the best book I've read on quantitative finance (and I thought Hull was pretty good). The language is easy, the math is not cumbersome, everything is clear.If I had to make a suggestion, it would be in text references. They specify the author and publishing year, but often omit the name of the book (e.g. Wilmott refers to Neftci's 1996 book as the best on stochastic calculus for beginners, yet Amazon doesn't show anything by this author from that year)

It was a gift, and he loves them.

They said it will arrive in a month. Actually it arrived almost within a week. The quality is perfect, as they promised. I have no complaints at all.

This book was a big disappointment for three reasons: 1) it doesn't have a proper focus. Author wanted to cover everything and that's why the book is making sloppy impression, i.e. too wide and not too deep when it is necessary; 2) it doesn't help you as a quant in the everyday quant life. It doesn't show you how to backtest models, it doesn't tell you how to use all this knowledge in the practical way, it doesn't even tell about the robustness and out of sample testing; 3) it is an arbitrary collection of known theories with some unexplained extracts from the different fields which are not connected with each other in the logical way.As the final accord: why the "quant bible" is based on the "normal" distribution. How long are we going to use all this useless in practice old concepts like Black-Scholes models etc?

As promised

The book mentions too many things that somebody who did not already know about quantitative finance cannot hope to get a job after reading this 3 volume set. It is much better to focus on developing fundamental knowledge in a particular field. In case of quantitative finance - probability and statistics, linear algebra, computer programming, stochastic calculus.