I am not going to learn how to write by hand, I do not need it and it is a waste of time in the era of google pinyin. I am using Teach yourself, and other resources, some paid resources.
My plan is to learn how to write the first 1000 common characters, just to get how the language works and to know how to read the language and then I would just learn the pronunciation and if I want to write, I would write using Pinyin since I know the pronunciation, it would work well.