I'd recommend the materials we're putting together for students who want an excellent introduction to contemporary colloquial mandarin. This is presumably what the parent poster wants to speak:
http://popupchinese.com
DeFrancis has done wonderful work in the dictionary space and is great for disabusing people of the notion that the Chinese language is fully ideographic. His textbook series is dated though and the language in it does not reflect the way people speak today. I may have a conflict of interest here since Popup Chinese is my business, but this is also a genuine recommendation since we really are the best thing out there. Also, our podcasts are free so it isn't exactly a hard sell.
Going back to the parent post, I wouldn't take seriously any approach that suggests anyone will learn the language simply by memorizing the most common 3000 characters. That's a bit like suggesting someone will be able to speak English from knowing how to spell 95% of the most common syllables. It is a form of knowledge, but not a terribly useful one if communication is what really matters.