Applied C# in Financial Markets (The Wiley Finance Series)

Rating:
Summary: It's Great to see C# in a Serious Financial Book!
Review: As a specialist in Financial Services, .NET and Agile Development this book covers two out of three. I am extremely glad that C# is getting the recognition it deserves.

C++, C, Java, and other languages probably have a larger developer base for another 6-12 months, but economic pressures I believe will force companies to move to .NET and C#. It's rather easy for a C++ or Java developer to make the move (and they rarely go back). Why would a manager spend 100% more to achieve the same result? It is senseless and luckily, the best companies are changing now, and have been for over a year. The laggards will suffer and will adapt, or take a chunk out of profits (or go deeper in the Red). Why do I know? This is what my firm does. We help the world's largest financial firms gain competitive advantage through `common sense'. Common sense is doing more with less. Never compromising on quality and handing their competitors their hats.

My only complaint is this book does not go quite as deep as I would like and I am hoping subsequent books will focus on much deeper quantitative techniques.

C# allows individuals and teams to write production code that can scale to thousands of concurrent users, at often a fraction of the cost of the other major platforms (and with better quality in many cases). With Visual Studio 2005 and .NET 2.0 (and .NET running on every major operating system soon) this is `common sense'. People who say Microsoft cannot do 'Enterprise Software' are simply misinformed and I would love for them to contact me so I can provide the studies to prove them wrong (I am not being confrontational, only truthful).

I would like to thank Martin Worner for his excellent work, and the `The Wiley Finance Series' for publishing this book. Again, competitive forces are already moving our industry to .NET. I certainly could never recommend another platform unless it was a 'real time' system or another specialized system type that makes a managed environment inappropriate. This is rare, and outside the scope of what we do.

.NET already runs on Linux (see www.go-mono.com) and Berkeley BSD (Have you seen .NET on a Mac?). But more importantly, as a Financial professional, the WinTel platform is more then capable enough (look at the work of my friends at the Cornel Theory Center! It is astounding!).

Memory Leaks are something that cost Financial Companies dearly in downtime, wasted resources, and general instability. With Memory Leaks now something you do not need to worry about (with rather infrequent and esoteric exceptions) in .NET, if you have not made the change to .NET, have you really taken a serious look at what you might be wasting? It might be worth a look.

Again, excellent book.

Kind Regards,
Damon Carr, Chief Technologist and CEO
agilefactor
www.agilefactor.com

Rating:
Summary: Highly Disappointing!
Review: Highly Disappointing!

From the author's experience mentioned in biography, I had high expectations from "Applied C# in financial markets", none of them was fulfilled by the superficial text which left me wondering why would Wiley ever added it in its financial books portfolio.

As the statement of purpose mentions "This book is designed to help experienced programmers into the C# language. It covers all the relevant concepts from a finance viewpoint." none of this I found to be true. This book is certainly not intended for experienced programmers as "Creating a new project in Visual Studio.Net" and "what is an assembly" are not advance programming topics. If you are looking for credit risk prediction algorithm implementations, Monte Carlo Method, Bayesian inference, artificial neural networks in finance or anything of this genre, this book doesn't cover it. It barely discusses Black - Scholes Option Pricing Models and Implicit finite difference models.

If you are considering it a C# tutorial book, it is not! You may find few interesting examples in chapters of object oriented programming, XML and Trading Exception management but its not worth buying a over priced ($79.99) book when you can find various good tutorials in the market covering a whole lot more than this. I'd recommend to read Joshi's "The Concepts and Practice of Mathematical Finance (Mathematics, Finance and Risk)" C++ Design Patterns and Derivatives Pricing (Mathematics, Finance and Risk) and Microsoft Press's "Microsoft® Visual C#™ .NET Step by Step".

Rating:
Summary: A bad c# book with a few simple finance examples
Review: I unfortunately bought this book when there were no reviews. The book offers a VERY basic overview of c#. It offers virtually no insight into the advantages of c# in the financial industry. The only reason this book has anything todo with finance is that a few examples are very basic options conepts (ie a black scholes calculator). To top it off - the syntax has quite a number of errors. One is better off buying an o'reilly book for the c# and searching google for a few examples of c# use in finance.