Before I found RTK I was happy with the "Basic Kanij Book" series.  It's two volumes that gets you to about 1,000 kanji.  There is also a "Intermediate Kanji Book" series that gets you through the rest of the 常用漢字.

(Like most people who post here the easiest way to get through them all is still Heisig's RTK or one of the many modifications of it.)

tokyostyle wrote:

Before I found RTK I was happy with the "Basic Kanij Book" series.  It's two volumes that gets you to about 1,000 kanji.  There is also a "Intermediate Kanji Book" series that gets you through the rest of the 常用漢字.

(Like most people who post here the easiest way to get through them all is still Heisig's RTK or one of the many modifications of it.)

Basic kanji book only takes you to 500 kanjis, not 1000. Each volume covers 250 kanjis. My own quirk with it was the order of the kanjis, which didn't make much sense to me. Other than that, I enjoyed it. Intermediate kanji book was too big of a leap after that though; the jump in difficulty is too much, and there aren't enough explanations in it imho. Our Uni moved on to kanji 700 (which is pretty underwhelming, but it's better than nothing, I guess).