In financial derivatives, people are generally dealing with all kinds of stochastic processes. This second course focuses on diffusion processes and prepares one with adequate knowledge to go ahead and understand how options are priced. This book itself does not touch any financial theory and will be of great use to people in genetics, mathematics and physics alike (finance also, of course). The authors give a chart of logical dependence of all the chaptors so you do not need to read every single corner if you are only interested in a specific topic. Readers are assumed to know Calculus and some basic probability theory. Knowledge of Brownian motion is not required and the authors succeded in keeping the math accessible. Although a mature senior might undertake this book, math in this book is not sloppy at all. Another thing I liked this book very much is there are so many excersices at the end of each chapter and one can check if he understands the materials or not. It's quite fair to give this book five stars.