hi all, can anyone recommend a book for lerning chinese, for a beginner.. Thanks in advance.

You may want to consider audio CD's first such as Pimsleur and/or Sinolingua and/or auralog, etc. as those will help you with grammar and tones right off the bat and you will make much faster progress than with books. Also look at chinapod. Books are really not a good way to go as a beginner unless you have a teacher/tutor in which case he/she would recommend the reading material.

Agree with Renovator. Pronunciation is key and for that you will most likely need to hear the works to retrain your tongue.

I would also suggest that you look at Pleco 2.0 fairly early on:
http://www.pleco.com/index.html
With a smartphone you can then translate the Chinese SMS messages you receive, word docs, etc. and build flash cards within Pleco to learn words. Pleco also has audio to hear pronunciation and a place where you can draw characters and then the sofware will tell you what that character is, what words that character is used in plus dozens of other features.

Serge Melnyck's free podcast lessons on iTunes are excellent.

^ On his webiste Serge Melnyk you'll find around 155 free downloadable mp3 lessons as well.