Highly recommended

As a student of Japanese until I die I have used and abused many text books and have come to let you know what My favorites are!

For beginning learners of Japanese I highly suggest the text book:

Japanese for College Students

It has 3 levels and covers reading, writing, grammar, role play and more.
My favorite and I think most important part of the book is the fact that it uses Kanji from the first lesson （これは何ですか。） kore wa nan desu ka.
the cool thing is that it uses furigana for any new kanji introduced but drops it after the kanji has been used in at least 3 lessons great for having to memorize the kanji you learn. It doesn't drop a bomb of kanji either the the essentials in the beginning by the end of the 3 books you can read a Japanese editorial in a newspaper.

For kanji dictionaries:

Kodansha's learners dictionary

faster to find a kanji then an a-z dictionary and faster then my electronic drawing kanji dictionary. It takes an average of 9 seconds to find an Kanji and also list the most common compond kanji words.

Hope this helps anyone enjoy!

If I may I'd also like to recommend a series:

I highly recommend Eleanor Jorden's and Mary Noda's "Japanese: The Spoken Language" series. It does an excellent job of explaining grammar using linguistics to help you really understand the implications of the language. The textbooks are written using roomaji, so if you can't read kanji or kana then it's great. You can also buy a small supplement that has all the conversations and drills (which there are over 2000 in the series) written in Japanese as well. There is also a series of books called "Japanese: The Written Language" (same authors) that teach you how to write in tandem with the textbook series. However, a slightly better book for learning Kanji is Eleanor Jorden's "Reading Japanese" which goes in tandem with her "Beginning Japanese" series. I have not seen this one so I can't compare the two. Both series have audio CDs associated with them as well.

I know this is fallacious, however I will mention two things in attempt to further support the book. Eleanor Jorden is a professor emeritus of Cornell University and was, for several years, director of Cornell's renowned FALCON program for intensive Japanese. Even outside of the FALCON program Cornell is well respected by other top universities across the world for it's Japanese program (including Harvard, Stanford, Tokyo U., and Cambridge).

All this being said, I will say the book is not perfect. It is slightly dated (published in 1989) so some of the scenarios in conversations are not applicable (such as the new-found wonder of contact lenses). However, the underlying grammar of the language does not change and that is why this textbook series is so useful (with allowance for the newer speech patterns and sayings that did come into being since then, I would say that 99% of the book is still 100% accurate).