Johnson is as good an overview as any. There isn't any book out that really gets to the heart of the matter, but here were several worthwhile books discussed earlier in the thread. Bear in mind, someone who's printing money isn't going to step away from the battle for 12 months to write a $49.99 book.
The original question reminds me a lot of old times in the mid and late 1990's when people asked the best way to learn how to trade and the answer was start with "paper trading", then work your way up to putting a couple thousand in a live trading account "plan on losing it all" as the price of education and then, if you're serious, start again with the knowledge gained and perspective for the task at hand. Using that concept as a framework and based on what I've seen over those many years, it seems to me that most if not all successful algorithmic developers running blackbox systems, first and foremost had & do have a solid programming background and "learned" how to apply computer science to solve a variety of trading equations simply by having spent countless hours as discretionary traders behind the keyboard and staring at the screen. I don't think you can learn the meat of it in a book or the classroom. But you can achieve it by diligence, tenacity & perseverance no matter what background. I'd say it's a process and for those who succeed, a calling!
We have extensive learning material on algorithmic trading on the TT website. https://www.tradingtechnologies.com/products/trading-analytics/xtrader/adl/ https://www.tradingtechnologies.com...ngtechnologies.com/forumdisplay.php?24-ADL%AE
I don't know if this fits what you're looking for, but there is a coursera course on computational investing that might be worth taking. https://www.coursera.org/course/compinvesting1
Forget about books and courses. Do not spend a dime on them. They do convey misconceptions in most times. Often those who write a trading book do so after having failed in trading. Follow this expert and you will learn everything you need at no cost to you: https://www.quantstart.com/articles/Beginners-Guide-to-Quantitative-Trading https://www.quantstart.com/articles/Self-Study-Plan-for-Becoming-a-Quantitative-Analyst
Ha? "Do not read and do not learn the underlying tools but read(!) this expert? Are you dumb or stupid? Which of the two?
At least the author was being honest: "quantitative trading is an extremely complex......area of quantitative finance." "In order to carry out a backtest procedure it is necessary to use a software platform." However, I totally disagree with this: "For HFT strategies in particular it is essential to use a custom implementation." That may have been true 5-10 years ago. Now, there's tons of proven platforms out there now....Tradestation, Multicharts, TT, etc. It's an enormous task to create a solid backtesting platform from scratch. When Tradestation first created TS2000i, it was like a million lines of code....and when they couldn't fix the bugs, they ended-up rewriting it as SAAS.