resources

General Resources

I recommend looking through the Sanskrit Resources page (compiled by Guy Leavitt) on the MESAAS website for all kinds of online resources. Many of the older grammars, readers, and lexicons listed here are available as cheap paperback reprints from various Indian publishers. These are usually fine, but sometimes the quality of the text is extremely poor, pages are missing, etc.

Grammars

• William Dwight Whitney's Sanskrit Grammar (first published in Leipzig in 1879). First edition available at the Sanskrit Library and as a PDF on the Internet Archive; second edition available at the Sanskrit Library. Wikisource has an HTML version of the second edition. amazon.com has several editions (published by Harvard University Press, Dover, and Motilal Banarsidas). [This is the standard English-language grammar of Sanskrit.]
• William Dwight Whitney's Roots, Verb-Forms, and Primary Derivatives of the Sanskrit Language (Supplement to Sanskrit Grammar, first published in Leipzig in 1885). Online version at the Sanskrit Library, and PDF of the first edition on Internet Archive. Reprint by Motilal Banarsidas on amazon.com. [Better than a dictionary for figuring out what gaṇa a particular root is conjugated in.]
• The Sanskrit Grammarian is a web application designed by Gérard Huet that produces declensional and conjugational tables of Sanskrit nouns and verbs. With the right input it can be very useful, though there are still some snags.
• M. R. Kale's Higher Sanskrit Grammar. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidas, 1961. PDF on Internet Archive. [A detailed and traditional grammar, a good corrective to Whitney.]
• Arthur Anthony Macdonell's Sanskrit Grammar for Students (first ed. Oxford 1927 on Internet Archive). [Very concise.]
• Jacob Wackernagel and Albert Debrunner, Altindische Grammatik. Published by Vandenhoek & Ruprecht in Göttingen. Vol. I: Lautlehre (first ed. 1896 at Internet Archive; second ed. 1957, with introduction by Louis Renou and additions by Albert Debrunner), Vol. II.1: Einleitung zur Wortlehre, Nominalkomposition (1905; Internet Archive), Vol. II.2: Die Nominalsuffixe (1954), Vol. III: Nominalflexion, Zahlwort, Pronomen (1930). [Though lacking a volume on the verb, this is the most comprehensive reference grammar.]
• Louis Renou's Grammaire Sanscrite (2 vols., Paris 1975).
• Jan Gonda's A Concise Elementary Grammar of the Sanskrit Language (translated by Gordon Ford for University of Alabama Press in 1966).
• Manfred Mayrhofer's Sanskrit Grammar (translated by Gordon Ford for University of Alabama Press in 1972). [Very good for background on comparative and historical linguistics.]
• Thomas Burrow's The Sanskrit Language (3rd ed. London 1973, reprint by Motilal Banarsidas 2001). [Also has some comparative/historical background, but more dated than Mayrhofer's and more idiosyncratic.]

Lexicons

• Monier Monier-Williams' A Sanskrit Dictionary (revised ed. Oxford 1899). The Sanskrit Lexicon Project at the University of Cologne has two online interfaces for this dictionary, an older one (which I prefer because it can do substring searches) and a newer one. On the project's website you can find other digitized lexicons, including the Grosses Peterburger Wörterbuchof Boehtlingk & Roth (if for some reason you can't find something in MMW).
  • This link should help you to install Monier-Williams' Sanskrit Dictionary on Goldendict, a useful off-line dictionary program.
• Vaman Shivaram Apte's Practical Sanskrit-English Dictionary (revised ed. Poona 1957-1959), searchable on Digital Dictionaries of South Asia at the University of Chicago.
• Arthur Anthony Macdonell's Practical Sanskrit Dictionary (London 1929), searchable at the Chicago site.
• Ralph Lilley Turner's Comparative Dictionary of Indo-Aryan Languages (London 1962-1966), also searchable at the Chicago site. [Good if you have questions about Hindi/Bengali/Marathi etc. cognates.]
• Manfred Mayrhofer's Kurzgefasstes etymologisches Wörterbuch des Altindischen / A Concise Etymological Sanskrit Dictionary (Heidelberg 1956-1980). [Mayrhofer's etymological dictionaries are comprehensive, theoretically up-to-date, and judicious. This one has lemmata in English and explanations and references in German.]
• Manfred Mayrhofer's Etymologisches Wörterbuch des Altindoarischen (Heidelberg 1986-2001). [A longer and more up-to-date dictionary, but only in German.]
• Eventually Alexander Lubotsky will release an etymological dictionary of Proto-Indo-Iranian in the Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionaries series (accessible here with a CU account).

Readers/Primers/etc.

• Charles Rockwell Lanman's A Sanskrit Reader (Cambridge, MA; first edition of 1912; 1963 edition on Internet Archive).
• Arthur Anthony Macdonell's A Vedic Reader for Students (Oxford 1917, Internet Archive). [Currently being revised for a new edition.]
• James Coulson's Teach Yourself Sanskrit, revised by James Benson (most recent edition 2010, on amazon.com).
• Robert Goldman and Sally Sutherland Goldman, Devavāṇipraveśika (3rd ed. 1999 on amazon.com).
• Madhav Deshpande's Saṃskṛta-Subodhinī (1999 ed. on amazon.com).
• Murray B. Emenau's Sanskrit Sandhi and Exercises. Revised Edition. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1958.

Bibliographies etc.

• SARDS 3 (hosted at Halle) is a good place to start searching for bibliography (books and journal articles).
• The Bibliography of Asian Studies (accessible with a CU account).
• Digital Library of India [Lots of texts available when the server is working, which can be downloaded with some finagling.]