Reddit mentions of German Made Simple: Learn to Speak and Understand German Quickly and Easily

For exposure to German, there's Heise.de and Tagesschau, the latter does a 100 second news blurb every day and they have streams you can listen to and catch up on news.

About.com German is a great start and first exposure. If you ever get frustrated by it and start to lose hope, check out Awful German Language by Mark Twain to give you a little chuckle.

You might want to try all ideas you have, since people learn differently than others. Studying abroad definitely helps, and there are plenty of free / cheap materials (other than Rosetta Stone, unless you snag it online) that you can get access to see which method works best for you. Personally, I've had a lot of help using books in German and language aids.

German in 30 Days and German Made Simple are great resources and my personal favorites.

I should add that I'm doing German as a side project, and for that I'm going very low-cost. As you could probably tell from my earlier post, I like paperback workbooks that I can write in, so I got a copy of German Made Simple ($14) and another Moleskine notebook, this one gold ($18). Other than that, I'm just using Duolingo (free) and Deutsche Welle's Deutsch Interaktiv program (free). Once I'm a few weeks in and can do more than a simple introduction, I'll do some short voice & video chats on italki, Coffeestrap, busuutalk, or HelloTalk (all free for basic use). The only other expense I foresee is reading material. I like parallel texts and Easy Reader books, which are usually pretty cheap online.

I used 'German Made Simple' from Three River Press. It has some minor inconsistencies, I think due to several revisions (originally published in the '60s), but once you overcome that, it really helps build basic grammar. I think it could be a nice complementary to the Dummies book if you want to learn the underlying grammar concepts besides the phrases. link