Reddit reviews Colloquial Chinese: The Complete Course for Beginners (Colloquial Series)

Do yourself a favor and start learning the characters in parallel. The reasons for this have been reiterated time and time again, and you can find plenty of articles discussing it on google. Succinctly:

• Chinese has tons of homophones (words that sound exactly the same). Learning the characters will help you separate them.
  
• Characters contain components that often reveal parts of the meaning or sound, and will help you remember the word. Learning the sound patterns alone is usually harder in the long run.
  
• You won't be able to use Chinese-English dictionaries, or comprehensive Chinese-Chinese dictionaries. The people who need dictionaries the most are precisely learners of Chinese.
  
• You will get access to more learning materials. Material for pinyin learners is limited to a few books for beginners. After that you are on your own, and will find that there is nothing that will take you to the next level unless you go back and learn to read (which is tedious and much more time consuming than learning to read from the start). Your only options will be to try to learn the language by listening to others or to TV/radio. If you are a 3 year old child, your brain is wired to do that, but as an adult learner you will consciously have to decipher everything. That will be hampered by all the dialectical differences and idiosyncrasies of individual speakers. The only way you have to find out if the person on TV said zhi-shao, shi-zhao, si-chao... might be to look at the subtitles and check the dictionary, and if you can't read that will not be possible.
  
  
  As for where to start: Amazon has a great selection of teach-yourself books. Just stay away from the ones that promise you "fluency in 10 minutes a day" (they lie) and especially programs like Rosetta Stone which try to make too much of a game out of the learning process, do not focus on teaching you semantic content in context and have no grammatical content. They are the most ineffective learning methods out there. This is a good starting point that will have you conversing from lesson 1.