I recently picked up: The Smartest Investment Book You'll Ever Read: The Proven Way to Beat the "Pros" and Take Control of Your Financial Future by Daniel Soli

I recently picked up: The Smartest Investment Book You'll Ever Read: The Proven Way to Beat the "Pros" and Take Control of Your Financial Future by Daniel Solin. A good basic starter book and very short. For a larger (and timely) economic view, I also slogged through This Time is Different by Reinhart and Rogoff. This book kind of looks at macro-economic conditions around recessions in history to abstract out a pattern around recessions, currency collapses, and depressions. It is not about the stockmarket in a very specific way. Neither of these sources are particularly hacker-centric viewpoints of the market. Are you looking for algorithmic trading stuff? You might want to check out http://quant.ly/ http://quant.ly/