about to start study of chess...guidance needed

Constant playing? No. Constant studying, analyzing, coaching, reading... maybe. Doubtful, but maybe.

Perhaps a bit optimistic but i think this is achievable.

My suggestions for what they are worth are:

 - on-going study of tactics, regularly in smallish chunks - sources mentioned above are all good ideas.  One to through in the mix as one i rate is Speelman's tactics book by Gambit

- study of endings - look for light weight books e.g. essential chess endings by Howell (the best i have seen) or Silman's endgame course.  The big tomes should be for later

- simple middlegame book - e.g. Simple Chess by Stean, Chess for Tigers.

- very limited openings (tough advice to follow, which invariably no one does) probably based around the open games

- thorough investigation of your games - please don't just rely on Fritz to annotate it for you

- you might want to pick up a collection of games - i think classical players are a good place to start e.g Morphy (beim wrote a good book on him).

I tend to believe in Rowson's advice that improvement comes through solving problems... no reading and nodding.  

another very good option would be Jusupov's beginner series published by Quality.

I think it is important not to try to absorb too much hence my suggestion of smaller books which can be built on over time.