From the movie Wall Street, "He wouldn't know the difference between preferred stock and live stock!".
As the entire financial world turned to garbage I found myself getting more and more interested in how that world functioned. I wanted to dig beneath the headlines but kept coming up frustrated as I'd read things and not know what they meant due to lack of vocabulary. I purchased a few stock market books and kept hitting the same wall until I turned up Jason Kelly's book here.
This book has a very good introductory section about how things work, from setting up a brokerage account to what all the various metrics are. He also does it in a semi-narrative fashin as opposed to offering me a straight out list of terms to memorize (being a student of history who can't memorize dates I really appreciate this).
The second section of the book deals with various strategies for investing in the stock market based on 6 'master investors'. While I am skeptical about the efficacy of some of these, I may be being colored by the fact that the Dow just plummeted over 5000 points. A great quote is, " A Dow company doesn't stay down and out forever." Which may be true, but isn't something I would have clinged to in recent months (See: AIG). It can be a little disconcerting that a Double the Dow strategy was published in January of the same year this happened, however, if you can see past that to what he is saying about investment in general, it will serve you well.
I will say, Mr. Kelly does give a solid, simple system for setting yourself up, and if you did pay attention you'd have cut your losses early in this recent mess. In all, I would recommend this book to anyone looking for an introductory book on stock market investing. Just don't make it your only book on investing. Jason Kelly urges that himself.