The late Don Harlow reviewed David Jordan's "Being Colloquial in Esperanto" in 2005 (at Amazon.com) and said this:

Despite this book's basic purpose (to help the English-speaking reader understand more about Esperanto), and despite the fact that it's definitely not a textbook, I would say that it's actually possible to learn the language from scratch via the first half of this book. Not for everybody, of course, but for the committed individual who is willing to plow through 118 pages of great (though never excruciating!) detail about Esperanto, its grammar and its word-formation system without drills or exercises.

Has anyone ever actually taken this book as a beginner and done this?

Not me but it's a great book with a ton of useful examples, certainly useful to a beginner as a reference grammar in English, if nothing else. You can access it for free online if you want to give it a shot without investing money.