You don't need a bunch of laboratory equipment or huge copper kettles and fermentors to start brewing your own beer. Almost all or your major equipment can be purchased online or from your local hardware store for relatively cheap. Home brew shops are great places to browse, but if you are on a budget stick to buying your grain, hops, and yeast there and scrounge for your equipment elsewhere.
Stove: Porch type stove that folks use for crawdad boils and such; most use Bayou Classic brand. They are low priced and good quality. Starting around 40 bucks and run off the same propane tank as a grill. Some have natural gas option. Typically the higher the better. BTU (for faster heating) and off the ground (to spare you a backache and keep blowing leaves and jumping bugs out of your kettle if your brewing in the yard).
Kettle: 7 or 8 gallons is good for starting off. You can
brew a 5 gallon batch and also do higher gravity 5 gallon batches with boil off. Stainless steel is better than aluminium. Stainless steel is also more expensive and heavier. Some guys like to get old kegs and cut the tops off.
Mash Tun/ Sparge Tank: 10 gallon cooler. Round drink coolers are best. This will give you the option of turning it into a lauter and mash combo. A square soda cooler works fine also. If you don't put a filtering system in you will just have to scoop the grain and hot wort into your lauter tun.
Lauter Tun: Two 7 gallon food grade buckets make a perfect lauter system. Just drill one bucket bottom full of holes and insert into the other. Charlie Papazian's book on brewing details this very well. My experience shows that this lauter system does not work well for flaked grains, however, I don't think any system really would. I just refuse to try and brew oatmeal anything.
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