Organic Learning: Five a-day.
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This lovely book lists a couple of thousand characters, but unlike its sibling (which concentrates on traditional forms) the emphasis is on those simplified variants promulgated by the Chinese government to promote literacy at least from the 1950s. These shortened characters were subsequently adopted by Malaysia and Singapore in the 1980s.
Each page holds a few 'letters' which are individually presented according to how they should be written. This is definitely not a workbook though. Sizing of the graphic is no problem and confusion is avoided by the use of block illustrations,ie. cursive strokes which you'd get with native or highly-adept speakers and writers of Chinese are a no-no.
Variant meanings come under the relevant character and the Pinyin index affords a quick lookup - making this good value book also useful as a beginning Chinese-English dictionary. In the main trunk of this physically lightweight tome - and within each character's allocated space - there's an illustration of the traditional version should this be different.
What's probably most important for the new learner is that with the index she'll be able to learn the writing simultaneous to any class she's attending, which will probably most likely just concentrate on the Pinyin transcription regardless of the (few) number of charcters introduced. If you're already familiar with some of the rules regarding stroke order, and are torn between this simplified version and the other traditional volume, I'd personally recommend that you obtain the latter since I've never had any problem with learning how to write simplified Chinese after I've studied the traditional forms. The former are in many cases just truncated versions of the older, literary characters.
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