For me, watching lots of subtitled anime helped with vocabulary
For reading, after/whilst learning the kana, I started playing RPGs in japanese, which helps with the kanji
The Multi-Radical Kanji Lookup tool in the link above is very good for learning/looking up new Kanji. I also downloaded a list of the Jouyou kanji, or the ones taught at japanese schools, to learn from. Can't remember where I got it from, but a quick google search gave
this nice wikipedia list which is basically the same thing. (No I still don't know all of them, I tend to know the ones which crop up more often in games
)
The only book I've bought is a grammer book to learn details about grammer, conjugations etc.
For dictionaries, there's either the online one posted above, or I've downloaded an old shareware program from NJStar which has a built-in dictionary and kanji lookup tools so I don't need to be online to do lookups. (Or I use Meredy's IRC dictionary script I wrote when I was still in uni
) I very rarely browse japanese websites - only started that recently looking for guides to RPGs not released outside Japan which I've been playing
Don't expect to learn it overnight though, I've been interested in it in my spare time for a quite a few years now, and still need to keep referring to dictionaries and stuff, and I certainly couldn't speak the language since I've not practised that side of thing