This book is the new edition of John Magee's classic General Semantics of Wall Street.
An indispensable companion to John Magee's and Robert Edward's classic, Technical Analysis of Stock Trends, Winning the Mental Game on Wall Street covers the mind set, the preconceptions, the false and misleading habits that hinder peak performance. It exhaustively deconstructs the movement of the stock market, shows you how to decipher its behavior, and teaches you its symbolic language or general semantics.
Written by John Magee and edited by W.H. Charles Bassetti, this book prepares you for the mental game on Wall Street. The book re-trains your mind to handle the market skillfully. Magee, arguably the wisest investment advisor in history, leads you toward a common sense mentality and method that virtually assures success in the long run. The secret? Right mind, right habits, right techniques. Through careful study and application of the concepts suggested by Magee, an average investor becomes a highly effective trader. Winning the Mental Game on Wall Street prepares your mind to operate effectively in the financial markets.

Of all the books available on the markets, this is the one I'd recommend to a beginner as a starting point. I'm not surprised that an amateur would be disappointed (or even dissapoined) in it since it doesn't provide quick-start recipes for guaranteed success in the financial arena. What it does do is explain what the markets are all about. It dispels the myths that lead to inevitable losses and eventual ruin, preparing one for the reality of the market rather than perpetuating the illusions that enable all those advisory services, newsletters, and gurus to flourish.
You won't learn the "best" MACD settings here.  What you will learn is the reality of the markets, a necessary first step toward creating a trading style.
Oddly enough, Amazon has paired the book with The Nature of Risk, above, at least temporarily, which is the second book I'd recommend to anyone interested in learning how to approach the financial markets.