Well written and commonly understandable introduction to buying and selling options contracts. The author has accomplished a rare feat in the annals of trading books in that this one can be understood entirely through audio listening, with little need to leverage charts, formulas, or diagrams to start trading these contracts. The pellucidity of his instruction is largely due to his well-thought-out pedagogy: 1. Introduce a topic concretely 2. Give some illustrative examples with simple exchanges 3. Go over basic decision criterion for profitability 4. Explore basic corner cases 5. Mechanically go over the step-wise function of writing the contract with a brokerage.
It doesn't hurt that thinking about options lends itself to binary decision tree-like analysis which should easily be digestible for most people. The author does a great service to the new reader on this front doubly by introducing contracts and strategies from easiest and most conservative first, namely selling covered calls, and progressing through increasing complexity each chapter to buying puts. There's also a small misc. the section on spreads, selling naked puts and strangles at the very end. Though this is really just an introduction to this material and isn't really functional.
A related plaudit that can be given to the author is that because of the methodical nature of this instruction, digesting the relatively small but esoteric nomenclature of options trading, being in/out/on the money, the strike, the logic, and consequences of leverage etc., is painless, and much clearer by the end of the book as the terms are thoroughly exercised in the analysis of the differing dichotomies of buying and selling i.e. for buying/selling a contract one may want the price to be on/below the money etc.
The sequential nature of the material allows practitioners to try out a particular strategy on their own and see for themselves how it works out in the market. From the standpoint of learning by doing, this book is probably best for those who have done a few months of equity trading on a hobby account, who's well versed with the 'logic' of buy-hold, but may want to develop gambits that can work for multiple market conditions, beyond the long and up. In this respect, selling covered calls will probably be the most useful strategy/contract combo that's outlined in the text, as it affords the practitioner to profit in sideways environments. From a comprehension standpoint, because it's also very similar to a profit-scheme of buying a rental property, as the author points out, it is a very well chosen first-topic for freshmen practitioners.
Thus, this book would go well with someone who's read "A Random Walk Down Wall Street", and may have read one or two books on setting up your own trading system like "The Risk of Trading" or "Inside the Black Box". After this book, and after a few months to a year of practice with these contracts, for the more mathematically inclined reader, they should try to take a short-course on options either at university or MOOC environment. CalTech's Options pricing might be a good place to start. Fo less mathematically inclined, there's a set of good books Wiley Finance publishes that are recommended by the author at the end of the text.
Great book, well written, although not needed, it's worth picking up a physical or ebook of this text as well, especially for beginners, as the author points out, you'll probably want to read it a few times over to make sure everything sticks. Highly recommended.