Hurrah! I have finished and passed my exams!
Anyway, this is an improvement on the Securities workbook. It's relatively well-written, and has a bit of a better structure (not fully sane, but better). The explanations are not bad, although it gets a bit tedious reading about options and futures from scratch if you've got a decent amount of experience in it.
It's certainly not going to tell you about risk-neutral valuation. However, it does cover some more real-world aspects than most financial engineering volumes. You get to hear about clearing and settlement, and all the various exchanges and systems (in more detail than is really sane).
It's clearly a workbook for a course, lacking the polish, coherence and interest of a normal textbook. For those who are experienced, some of the details are... suspect. However, you could do a lot worse.
Posted 2013-11-19.