The market leader, ESSENTIALS OF INVESTMENTS, 4/E is an undergraduate textbook on investment analysis. The authors have eliminated unnecessary mathematical detail and concentrated on the intuition and insights that will be useful to practitioners throughout their careers as new ideas and challenges emerge from the financial marketplace. ESSENTIALS maintains the theme of asset allocation (authors discuss asset pricing and trading then apply these theories to portfolio planning in real-world securities markets that are governed by risk/return relationships). ESSENTIALS also continues to develop modern topics. The major objective in this revision is to maintain the current level in content and coverage, but work on improving the text's accessibility by enhancing presentation, pedagogy, and design.
This book is more of an intermediate level, not recommended for beginners. Some examples of the end-of-chapter problems are provided in excel format via online student resources, which is very helpful. But you won't be able to the answers for most of the problems. All in all, quite a good read for those who want to learn more about portfolio management.