You must prepare well before you send out resumes to any bank or financial related companies. Here we review some must-read books for your interview preparation. By following the instructions and finish each book you should be able to claim on your resume that you have finished John Hull's book and other prerequirements.

Books for interview:
    These are the minimum requirements for you to walk through succseefully an interview. Try to start as earlier as possible. If you are still at school, go to business school or finance department of your university to take related courses such as investment, finance, fixed income, derivatives etc., go to math department to learn statistics and stochastics, if you have time, go to computer science department to learn programming as well. Fortunately, as a Ph.D. in science and engineering, you should have background in one of them already, just need learn the new things and prepare for interview questions.

0. The Wall Street Journal
    Almost surely you will be asked whether you are following the market. It is your great advantage to subscribe to the wall street journal and read the news and reports daily. Not only you can follow the business news, economy from the newspaper, you also learned many financial terminologies and common-sense from reading WSJ frequently. By reading it, you can boast when you are interviewed by investment banks, you can talk with interviewers about the current news, especially the news related to the company you are applying for. You should pay attentation to the level of stock indexes, treasury yields, spreads etc. Subscribe now to get up to 8 weeks FREE!

Alternatively, you can choose The Financial Times, which is printed in London, but delivered to worldwide. It is much shorter, focusing exclusively on business and finance than Wall Street Journal. Some people also think it is better written in terms of financial explaination of news and policies than Wall Street Journal. It might be a good choice for starters or anyone who does not like to read thirty-page per day.

1. John Hull---Options, Futures and Other Derivatives (6th Edition) (Required)

     John Hull's Options, Futures and Other Derivatives (6th Edition) is the classic textbook for future quants. It deals extensively with derivative markets, products and basic math used in derivatives. It is a must-have for an outsider to learn from scratch the basics of finance and derivatives. It gets you familiar with lot of finance language with real market examples. The analytical part is coarse but good enough for you to understand the principles of derivative pricing. It may look like inconsistent if you come from rigior fields such as physics, math or engineering. Since there is no coherent theme in the book to be developed from scratch to theory and finally applications. You have to admit, that, finance is more of a social science than natural science. You should keep remind yourself and you should get used to the fact that most financial books are composed of vast financial products and explainations of how they work. Whatever, John Hull's book is the single most important book for a beginner to get into finance as fast as possible. Read the first 24 chapters (5th edition) at least. The Solutions Manual and Study Guide is also available for self study.

    This is THE book for you to crack into wall street. No kidding. Once you read it, you will know how valuable it is. It contains hundreds of interview questions that have been asked on the wall street. It includes brain teasers, math problems, probability problems, option theory and general finance, behavior questions. You have to do EVERY problem one by one and only but this, you can gain the skills of solving brain teasers and the understanding of option theories. The book has answer for every question but don't look for the answer before you try hard to get it by yourself. The finance part of the book is so well written that each question solves one of the puzzles you may encounter when you read finance book. I know a trader, on his first day, was asked by his boss to buy this book first and read it throughly. Although many of the questions may not be asked during your interview (probably because it's so well known that everyone on the wall street knows it and there is no need to ask the questions on the book), but you do encounter one or two questions from the book time to time. So why they will ask question that is well know to interviewees? Because wall street likes person with good preparation, they expect you to be prepared, they expect you know what you are doing and they appreicate your hardwork by questioning you something you know. It's hard to find real interview questions for you to practice, so DO WORK OUT EVERY PROBLEM!

    Many people don't have the background of stochastics even for some math Ph.Ds. However, it is required for quants. This book introduces you easily through financial examples how the stochastics is used in the option pricing theory. A Ph.D. will have no problem follow the book chapter by chapter and you should do the exercises after each chapter to get yourself falimilar with the conecepts and principles. Among them, you should know the definitions of Markov, Martingale, Brownian motion, Ito's Integral, Ito's lemma, Girsanov theorem, Feyman-Kac.
    You can download the solutions manual for the book's exercise here, Free! Here is the Errata by Gabriel Chan .

    Scott Meyers has written something classic. His effective series on C++ language have proved to be extremely valuable for both new and experienced C++ programmers. He teaches you the ins and outs of C++ language. He points out the common pitfalls encountered during object-oriented programming. The value of these books for quants are in the interviews. This has been proved by many quants. Many interviewers will ask you C++ questions whose answers can be found in the books. If you are not familiar with C++ and want to prepare for an interview of programming related position, you definitely need the books. Not only you learn from Scott Meyers, he also prepares you for the interviews.