Rating: 
Summary: Depends on What You Want:
Review: If you are looking for a "you can do this in your own home" guide, then this book is not for you. If you already know how to find the answers but don't know what questions to ask, then you will value Wilmott's high-level discussions.To get the best use from this book you need to know the hard math (stochastic calculus, PDEs, etc.) and be familiar with valuation in general (models, assumptions, and analytical methods). Wilmott includes crash-courses on these topics but I'm not sure who would find them useful. With these tools under your belt, Wilmott's discussions of discrete-time dynamic hedging, the behaviour of path-dependent securities, etc. are invaluable for developing intuition and guiding your own research. After all, if the book just gave out answers to the hard questions, you couldn't buy it for a few hundred dollars!
Rating:
Summary: Even more Wilmott..!!!
Review: If you liked his previous works, you will love this...! Even more extensive coverage of topics and, somewhat deeper. The only drawback is its price and the fact that it has several chapters identical with the "simpler" version (Derivatives).
Rating:
Summary: Easy to understand
Review: It makes difficult material easy to understand.
Rating:
Summary: One of the best !!
Review: Paul Wilmott's QF books are some of the best on the market. His writing style is clear and the models he demonstrates make it easy to learn and develop techniques that otherwise are purely academic. If you are new to Quant Finance I would suggest picking up a true introductory text like the one authored by Watsham and Parramore. But other than a brief introduction to the area of QF you will have no difficulty in following much of what Wilmott develops. Truely worth reading.
Rating:
Summary: Mathematical finance for non rocket-scientist
Review: Put it this way, this book won't make you an expert in financial engineering. Yet, if you are the sort of people don't have a very good background in mathematics (i.e. only have a first degree in science/engineering) but want to have a rough idea about financial engineering, then this is the book for you. Of course, if you want to be a quant earning mega-buck and deriving your own model, then probably you still need to learn the things in the hard way. In other words, learn all the martingales and stochastic integral and be a geniune rocket scientist. This book won't offer you a short cut.
Rating:
Summary: Oh, Yes!
Review: Reading these books feels like coming home after all the jargon-filled, probabilistic **** of more traditional books! As an ex-physicist I really appreciate the way Wilmott approaches the subject. Most of the methodology is the kind of math I'm used to. The martingale stuff is kept well out of the way, but by half way through you'll realise why...the probabilistic approach is just too limited. I'd like to see the probabilists do some of the funky models that Wilmott describes. Some of my favourite chapters were the ones on non-probabilistic interest rate models. Totally creative and fascinating. Can I give this six stars?
Rating: 
Summary: Don't Bother
Review: The author has made a career out of writing the same book on derivatives over and over again. His best remains the original effort which he co-authored with Dewynne and Howison. With this latest incarnation, Wilmott seems to be having a mid-life crisis. The book is crammed with sophomoric humor and descriptions of his personal life. He tells us of his divorce and about his subsequent dating exploits. He makes references to women (including several sketches) that are uniformly sexist. None of this is desirable or appropriate in a financial text. There is a lot of financial content here, but it is not reflective of recent trends (especially more active use of stochastic calculus) in financial engineering.
Rating:
Summary: Not practical or academic enough
Review: The finance market is flooded with paper, but much is redundant and some isn't even very useful. This book manages to be both. "Market Models" by Carol Alexander is a fabulous resource. There are a lot of books and articles on quantitative finance and if you want only that, look through the literature and choose, but this book won't give enough comprehensive coverage to make it a buy.
Rating:
Summary: Not practical or academic enough
Review: The finance market is flooded with paper, but much is redundant and some isn't even very useful. This book manages to be both. "Market Models" by Carol Alexander is a fabulous resource. There are a lot of books and articles on quantitative finance and if you want only that, look through the literature and choose, but this book won't give enough comprehensive coverage to make it a buy.
Rating: 
Summary: rather limited
Review: The theory of derivatives pricing is the observation by Black and Scholes that the randomness in the value of an option can be balanced by the randomness of the underlying stock. This leads to a partial differential equation for the price of the option known as the Black-Scholes equation. Following on from this, mathematical finance has developed into a burgeoning field. The PDE approach has however been largely superceded by the more advanced martingale-based risk-neutral evaluation approach. This book is an extended edition of Wilmott's previous book Derivatives and suffers from similar defects. It is a good basic introduction to the PDE approach to pricing but is limited in scope and viewpoint. Trees, risk-neutral pricing and martingales barely rate a mention. Every problem is fitted into the PDE approach whether it makes sense or not. If you want to spend a lot of money learning Wilmott's view on finance then this is the book for you. But if you want a good overview of modern financial techniques then save your pennies.
| 
