I find metastock is a very good package...does all that I need.
It can be self taught(thats how I did it)...there are forums around like guppys forum where all your questions get answered. A course would probably speed things up.
I put the data in each night which takes about 5 minutes...i then run 2 explorations each night...one for the long side and one for the short side...this takes about 5 minutes each.
i then eyeball all the charts that meet my criteria...usually 2-300 depending on how hard the market is trending...usually 2 seconds roughly on each chart. End up with roughly 5 or 6 a night to watch for the next day.
technical analysis explained by pring is not a bad read to get started...guppies books are good to start with aswell and shares magazine has a charting offspin to.