If the standard technical analysis/chart pattern/candlestick books are too expensive for you, Charting and Technical Analysis by Fred Mcallen was the first book I read on the subject and is a decent primer. It's not extensive, but it's only $6 on Kindle and goes through the most popular chart patters, candlesticks and indicators. You certainly won't know how to trade after reading it, but it's a good intro.
You'll have to decide how much you want to invest in your education. Books are the cheapest part of learning to trade. You'll have plenty of market losses in the meantime that dwarf whatever you spent on books. If $60 is too much for a book (that represents the standard of the particular topic) then perhaps you may want to reconsider learning how to trade. Just being honest. I try to read at least 1 trading/investing book per month (I've got a full time job, wife and kids so not much free time) and buy at least one from Amazon each month. I use my fun money, birthday money and christmas money to buy books. I don't ask for gifts anymore, just money so I can buy more books. I suppose I've read over 40 trading books since late 2011, and I know guys that have read hundreds and a few that have read thousands.
Here's a post that I wrote on another thread:
Generally I would recommend to folks that just want to touch their investments no more than once a year, to read stuff by William Berstein, John Bogle, Rick Ferri, Larry Swedroe, David Swensen, and others. Unfortunately (or fortunately), 'putting it all in index funds' is the best that most people can do. And it's the best advice you can give most people. They should spend their research time figuring out an intelligent asset allocation, and then get on with their lives to make as much money as possible to put into their portfolio.
But if you are curious, and you want to get a little more advanced, Mebane Faber writes some good stuff that's easy to understand. The Ivy Portfolio, his relative strength research papers on SSRN, Shareholder Yield and Global Value are all good books.
If that's still not enough for you, and you want to really go down the rabbit trail of active investing/trading (assuming you've already gone through the basic investing books above), then here you go:
Talent is Overrated by Geoff Colvin - this will tell you the effort you'll need to give to be the few % that actually can outperform the market
Michael Lewis and Jack Schwager are both good authors that cover the industry as a whole and make for entertaining reads, especially Schwager's Market Wizards books.
Value Investing authors:
Benjamin Graham
Philip Fisher
Joel Greenblatt
Whitney Tilson
Peter Lynch
Warren Buffett's letters to shareholders
David Einhorn
Growth/Momentum stock trading authors:
Jesse Livermore
Nicholas Darvas
William O'Neil
Martin Zweig
Stan Weinstein
Mark Minervini
Trend Following/Global Macro authors:
George Soros
Michael Covel (his podcast is fantastic and has a variety of guests - economists, psychologists, authors, entrepreneurs, traders, value investors, portfolio managers etc, I'd recommend listening to all the past episodes)
Andreas Clenow
Curtis Faith
Trading/Investing Psychology authors (this is actually the most important):
Brett Steenbarger
Mark Douglas
Van K Tharp
Ari Kiev
Technical Analysis/Chart Pattern authors:
Robert Edwards/John Magee
John Murphy
Steve Nison
Jeffrey Hirsch
Robert Prechter
Peter Brandt
Alexander Elder
Thomas Bulkowski
That should be enough reading for the next couple of years...