Rating: 
Summary: A very Good Intro Book
Review: It has been 2 days and 8 chapters through the Neftci book and I find it to be the best introduction into asset pricing that I have found. The explanations are clear and make sense. Furthermore the examples used are very inciteful. THe highlights however are the introduction to stocastic calculus, a and a very clear representation of martigales. There are a couple of downsides to this book, one is a lack of solutions to the exercises and the other is a shortage of exercises. I feel that I probably won't get as much out of this text for these reasons.
Rating:
Summary: Good book for the right audience
Review: It is amazing that people are not willing to take it what it is, an 'introduction' to mathematics of financial derivatives. The 'reader from New York' of 'notation challenged' seemed to have wanted a rigourous treatment of SDE, yet is sorely disappointed not to find it in this book. IMO it gives an extremely clear exposition of the various tools of SDE and having read it has allowed me to progress to books in which mathematical rigor is stressed over intuition. So in a nutshell this book achieved its stated goal of offering an intuitive and heuristic explanation of mathematics of derivatives to the novices taking their first steps in the financial engineering land.
Rating: 
Summary: Clear and very Effective
Review: My first book on the mathematics of financial derivatives, and I could not have picked a better one. I have a vey broad and deep knowledge in math, coming from a physics and engineering background. This book drove me comfortably into the world of stocastic processes inherent into the financial world.
Rating:
Summary: An ideal guide for introductory mathematics on derivatives
Review: Neftci does a good job in introducing the mathematics of financial derivatives to its readers. This book is ideal for MBA level quant finance knowledge. It does not go into rigorous mathematical depth but does a smart job of discussing the physics behind the principles of pricing derivative securities. The best part about this book is its parallel handling of PDE approach and the equivalent martingale measure. There is sufficient coverage for introductory level fixed income pricing mechanisms. The book does a good job in the end by converging the ideas of the two pricing methods. This gives a lot of clarity in the science behind such derivative contracts.Although the theory is covered clearly the problems are not correlated with the chapter contents. Do not get disheartened if you are not able to ace the problems. Rather use this book to build the base and clear the concepts.
Rating:
Summary: An Excellent Overview of Financial Calculus
Review: Neftci has written an excellent heuristic treatment of what might be called Financial Calculus -- the theory of derivative pricing. I enjoyed reading every single chapter, even the ones whose contents I already knew; each of the chapters gives an insightful & complete view of its topic (many times from a fresh perspective) written in an amazingly clear style. I was never once mystified by what I read. Baxter, the author of "Financial Calculus", could take lessons from this guy. A good companion work to the other works on financial calculus. As noted by other reviewers, the price is cheap.
Rating:
Summary: A valiant and successful attempt
Review: Neftci makes a valiant and serious attempt at explaining stochastic calculus and related mathematics of financial derivatives to the non-expert. I think he succeeds. The exposition may not be as rigourous as many people expect it to be, but that's the whole point of the exercise: to give the reader an introductory and motivated first exposure to risk neutral measures, martingales, stochastic differentiation and integration, Ito's lemma, PDE's, stochastic PDE's, equivalent martingale measures, Girsanov's theorem, and a lot more. This is definitely the very first book that a non-mathematician student of the subject should read. No doubt about that. I guess the burning question now is: Which book makes a natural second read? Baxter and Rennie? Bjork? Bingham and Kiesel? I think it should be one of these three.
Rating:
Summary: Good introduction to the quantfinance
Review: Neftcis book is a quite good introductory book. I read this book as a kind of preparation for the more advanced book by Tomas Björk. I think that in order for the reader to realy grasp the content (beeing able to apply as a practioner) its necessary to read some other book as well, which handles more of the details. The concepts are explained in a pedagogical way, and with a good structure of the chapters. But, you already has to know the maths as an engineer. And, I think its quite useless with excercises without a solution manual!
Rating:
Summary: Outstanding!
Review: Not only an excellent source on the math of derivatives pricing, but on stochastics itself. Found all of the generous examples intuitive. Great listings of other sources -- not just a huge bibliography to impress other academics. You need this book, even if you dont think you need it.-- Especially if you find Hull wanting, Duffie too dense, and you just dont know why Baxter mentions change of measure.
Rating:
Summary: Best Beginning Book on Subject I've Seen Thus Far.
Review: So far, the best intro book on the subject of advanced math for derviatives pricing theory I've found. I've tried several other books which claim to say you only need some intro calculus to follow along, only to be totally blown away after reading the first few pages (and putting the book back on the shelf). I guess nothing beats having a teacher by your side, but it would be nice to be able to follow along and least pick up some ideas on how the math works and what's behind it. This book allows one to do just that. For the math newbie (like myself), nothing beats a course on stochastic calc, PDEs, etc, to get you up to speed, and this book might be worth reading before taking those courses. This is why I gave 4 stars. However, the book could be vastly improved with worked out exercises and more graphical representations of the material.
Rating: 
Summary: Notation Challenged
Review: Straight to the point, clean, clear, very nice.
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