>>2
As a person with 3+ years of experience of studying Japanese, I suggest you learn the hiragana and katakana first. And by suggest I mean that you must learn them. They're the basic building blocks of the Japanese writing system, and learning them well will also help your pronunciation (and you won't be using the latin alphabet as a crutch). Only when you've mastered the kana, you should start learning kanji.
As for kanji books, I suggest the
Basic Kanji Book, vols. 1 and 2, by Chieko Kano et al., that teach you 500 basic kanji. It's a very good book series, and if you're poor/stingy/don't mind ebooks, there's a PDF version of both of the books floating around the torrent sites of the Internet.