Sanskrit for beginners

Manuals/grammars:

• [$$$] Michael Coulson - Teach Yourself Sanskrit Complete Course
• [ ] Arthur Anthony MacDonell - Sanskrit Grammar for Students
• [ ] Antoine Robert - A Sanskrit manual for high schools (1968)

Textbooks/readers:

• [ ] Charles Rockwell Lanman - A Sanskrit Reader: With Vocabulary and Notes (1912)
  
• [ ] The Sanskrit reader - Saṃskṛtapāṭhāvaliḥ

Internet resources:

• The Sanskrit Heritage Dictionary (Gérard Huet)
• [] Monier Williams dictionary - windows application

I also am looking for a list of easy Sanskrit texts, so if you have suggestions, please advise.

Google docs, now offline!

Google docs(docs.google.com), a tool for document editing that have many very useful features for those who work with text documents, now allows to it's users to edit the documents offline. This comes very handy for those who travel and don't have internet link, allowing them to edit the existing documents. One minus is that when working offline, one can't create new documents. An workaround this limitation is to have few spare documents around.

Among other features there is the sharing & collaboration, export of documents in various formats, printing, publishing of documents directly on blog or just making it publicly accessible and others I have not discovered yet.

I definitely recommend it.

More info about the offline feature.

Gérard Huet and his wonderful tools

Surfing the net randomly for various sanskrit related resources, I found the The Sanskrit Heritage Site. At first look, since the design is not quite modern I was tempted to close the window. But scrolling down the page my eye were attracted by a nice picture of Pāṇini, the famous grammarian. Close to it was a link to the declension engine. In the same page of the declension engine you also can find the conjugation engine.
Other tools you can find here are a powerful dictionary that allows you to search in various ways like inflected words or without diacritics.
All these are already a lot of tools but there are more. The tool I like the most is the Sanskrit Reader. Here you can analyze short phrases. Try it to feel it!

At the core of all these tools is th XML technology. The XML files are generously shared by mister Gérard Huet for programmers to develop their own tools.
Thank you, mr. Gérard Huet!