I havent brought any IT books for a few months until today when I picked up a copy of

Practical .NET for Financial Markets ( Apress, Shetty and Jayaswal )
Due to a two hour delay on my train commute home I managed to find time to dive into it.

First impressions what a great book. I am halfway thru chapter one. This chapter has no code or IT in it at all. Instead it details the people and institutions involved in trading in the equities market and how they relate to each other. The lifecycle of a trade and the processes involved.

Future chapters also look to have a heavy dose of business explanation intermixed with the architecture of the code written to solve the business problems, lots of real world code in C#.

Looks like Yogesh Shetty has a lot of experience in the IT for major financial institutions C#, SQL Server e.t.c Samir Jayaswal heads a Product Management & Product Development group for treasury and risk management products at 3i Infotech ltd. My guess is he provides a lot of the business explanation.

Great concept business and IT given equal status in the book. Chapter 1 is easy to read yet is in no way shallow, learning ( or reminding myself ) a lot. Very good to have it written by people earning their money developing the systems they write about for a living.

Also picked up a copy of Pro C# 2005 and the .Net 2.0 Platform by Andrew Troelsen. Mainly because all my C# books are pre version 2.0 and this looked like a good one.