welcome
Thank you for purchasing the MEAP version of our book, Build a Robo-Advisor with Python (From Scratch). We’ve enjoyed writing it, and we hope you’ll enjoy - and benefit from - reading it. We look forward to hearing your feedback and suggestions for making it even better.
We hope that readers will learn about both finance and Python by reading the book. It isn’t intended to teach either of those topics from the ground up - we expect that readers will have a basic understanding of both financial concepts and Python programming - but accessibility is important to us. If there are places where you feel we are assuming too much knowledge of either, please let us know. We also hope you’ll let us know if you feel like any chapters are too basic. We recognize that not all readers will benefit from every chapter, but we hope that every chapter is useful to someone.
The balance of theory and implementation varies by chapter. Some chapters are very financially-focused, and the Python content is limited to showing how a few functions from existing libraries can be used to perform certain calculations or accomplish desired tasks. In other chapters, there aren’t any existing Python libraries that we can use. These chapters are much more code-heavy, and essentially build new Python libraries implementing the concepts they cover. We know reading code isn’t always easy, so we try to show example usages of new code whenever possible to aid understanding.