a couple of dictionary recommendations

...The Sanseido Daily Concise Dictionary comes in Japanese-English (entries are in kana--not roman letters), English-Japanese, or both in one volume, and all entries show kanji. The single-direction dictionaries fit easily in a pocket. They are about half an inch thick and contain tens of thousands of entries. The English-Japanese Sanseido goes into kanji without furigana, though, so it is of limited use to beginners. But I have found that English-Japanese dictionaries tend to be of far less use than Japanese to English. Students seldom find the right word in Japanese by looking it up in a Wa-Ei. They so often end up with the wrong sense of the word.
 
For kanji, at the beginning of the second semester of first-year Japanese I teach students to use Nelson's Japanese-English Character Dictionary (the original "classic" version with the red cover--not the newer blue-cover edition out of the University of Hawaii that mangled Nelson's work).