Use Chess.com's chess mentor. These courses will start you right at the beginning and they will be a lot more helpful. Good luck.
Completely new to Chess. Want to get good in as efficient way as possible.
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For a complete beginner, try reading "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Chess" by Patrick Wolff first. Despite it's name, it's actually a very good high-level introductory overview of all of the major aspects of the game, and it's written in a conversational style that's easy to follow.
After that, work through a basic tactics book. I like "Chess Tactics for Students" by John Bain, but there are others.
While reading those, play a lot of slow games (G/30 or longer) so you have time to think about each move and practice the principles you have just learned.
most people are in the same boat when they learn chess.
they know the moves but not the strategy, they may suffer from misconceptions, they inevitably want to do well and improve rapidly.
its normal to think you need to have several books to jumpstart you chess playing career. if you've starting as an adult you may be aware that your potential to improve in chess is not as much as when you were young.
if you want to be prudent about it, though, which books to buy might come as a suprise, and that you can't buy your way to rapid improvement.
like most things, hard work is the building block of success in chess, and without effort and learning you will get very little from first efforts at chess.
this may all seem generic, but start with these kinds of thoughts. don't spend lots of money--but be very inquisitive about chess improvement. it is very good to begin regularly playing chess. games and preferably otb
this means "over the board", meaning you are looking for a way to play chess against strangers in a library or a club. but Don't despair if you can't find something locally. you can certainly play chess at chess.com and get your first few loses and lessons online.
develop patience and play slow forms of chess so you think and strive to play the best moves. there's extensive advice about how to choose moves, and ways to open you chess game without memorizing a lot of moves. memorize concepts, and learn to calculate moves and the oponent's moves (which is called analysis).
Jun 30, 2016
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#5
Knowledge
-Learn the relative values of the pieces (queen is 9, rook is 5 and so on)
-Learn algebraic notation so you can read books (e4 e5 Rb8 0-0 etc)
-Basic mates like King+rook+rook vs lone king | king+queen vs lone king and | king+rook vs lone king.
-Opening principals (fast development, the center, castling)
-Basic tactics (Forks, pins, removing the defender, discovered attack etc)
-Basic strategy (piece activity, pawn structure, king safety etc)
-Basic endgame ideas (king as a fighting piece, pawn majorities and pawn promotion, zugzwang)
Where to get it? You can google these terms for a taste / intro, but for a complete treatment Yasser Seirawan's Winning Chess series is very good (7 books in total). Here's the first book:
https://www.amazon.com/Play-Winning-Chess-Everyman/dp/1857443314
Skills
-Observation. This is a big one at first. "Oh I didn't notice you could capture my piece" is a common way to lose most of your pieces as a beginner.
-Calculation / visualization (Imagining a sequence of moves / imagining a future position)
-Falsification habits. This is my term, but the idea is widely known. Heisman calls failing to do it playing "hope chess." This is a lot like the observation I mention above except you're applying it to future positions that you're imagining. Mostly after just imagining 1 move (your candidate move) to see if your opponent can immediately exploit it with a forcing move. Forcing moves are checks, captures, and threats.
Where to get these? Play games with a time control long enough that you're able to consciously look around the whole board, and check your candidate moves. After a lot of practice this eventually becomes an unconscious habit. I suggest 30 minutes per side or longer. Ideally you also analyze each game afterwards (win lose or draw) and try to identify 1 or 2 major mistakes.
Solve tactical puzzles from a diagram without moving the pieces, forcing yourself to attempt to visualize each move.
When you use books, try to visualize a few moves before playing out the moves on a board. If you can only do 1 or 2 comfortably, then start there (don't spend an hour trying to visualize 10 moves and read 1 page per hour lol 
)
Structure
Over 100 years ago Capablanca (one of the greatest world champions) noted that as a beginner you want to give more time to playing than to study, and as you get better, give more and more time to studying. This is still well regarded advice today. You can read and play every day if you have the time, but I recommend more playing than reading. If you have the opportunity to join a local chess club that's ideal. After face to face games players often share their thoughts and advice.
As for general knowledge categories / books, I like to mentally divide it into 5 basic categories: Openings, endgames, strategy, tactics, annotated game collection. IMO as a beginner you want to read book from each category. This is also why I like Seirawan's series for beginners because he divides his books this way, but there are of course alternatives. Ask around and read reviews on Amazon to get a feeling for what's right for you. A great book that tends to fly under the radar these days is this however: https://www.amazon.com/Masters-Chessboard-Richard-Reti/dp/092389148X
I hadn't heard about it until I saw an IM (international master) that frequents this forum (Pfren) recommended it.
Other tools
Supplements to books.
-Videos. Passive learning is not as effective, but this can be a fun or relaxing way to get exposure to new ideas. This is a good youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/STLChessClub
-Chess engine. Some warn to stay away, other love them, I suspect the truth is somewhere in the middle. I suggest using one to quickly check games for tactical mistakes... and basically ignore any other moves it suggests. If it says you lose a knight, then that's important. If it says some other move is 1/4th of a pawn better without giving an explanation (they never do) then that's not helpful and even worse will often be confusing.
Interface: http://www.playwitharena.com/
Engine: (in green) http://www.computerchess.org.uk/ccrl/4040/
-Opening reference source. There are free online ones as well as books like MCO and expensive databases like chessbase. Opening memorization is a common pitfall for new players, but only because some try to memorize 10 or 20 moves in dozens of variations. That is silly, but what is useful is learning a handful of moves to the basic openings you play. To facilitate this, I recommend for every game you play, check your opening against a reference. See who left book first (your or your opponent) and what the "normal" moves are. Over time you will remember them, but not because you sat down to memorize 100 moves in 1 day, but because of the small but frequent exposure.
https://www.chess.com/explorer?moveList=&ply=0
http://www.365chess.com/opening.php
https://www.amazon.com/Modern-Chess-Openings-15th-Firmian/dp/0812936825
http://shop.chessbase.com/en?ref=RF76-09GSFKZH6T
Good luck!
Hi
This post has inevitably been done to death already but I feel that if I post my specifics myself then it would give me a better indication as to how to get good.
I really want to take up Chess and, at the moment, am a complete beginner. I know the pawn promotion, en passent and castling moves and where each piece can move to but that's it.
What 10 (or more) books would you recommend reading and in what order?
How do you suggest that I go about implementing the principles in the books to my advantage to get a good as quickly as possible?