[xamuel]

In my experience, those $100 university textbooks aren't worth the paper they're printed on. Tae Kim's guide is infinitely better, if you're an autodidact. Use Tae Kim for grammar, use Heisig Volume 1 for kanji, and use real Japanese for everything else.

[TheRealPomax]

That's why I wrote mine - my fellow students needed lecture notes in "not Dutch", which mine were, so this books started as a website with my lecture notes in html form, which slowly grew into the material for this book. It's $25 on paper, free online (donate whatever you feel it's worth), and generally covers what actually made sense to cover given the classes we were in.