and I also disagree with both of you ( i prefer emacs that exists on win32 and linux platforms. highlights, indentation, macros, simple and no big interface around
) but it s just a question of style...
As a java lecturer at my university, i will say that even in computer science, learning java in general appears to be far more complicated than it seems for beginners than for most of us on this forum. Learning to think "programmingly" is not easy. But if you trully wants to learn and don t have access to someone that can help you, I suggests you to buy one or two books in order to get started. Many people prefer to read sheets of papers than documents on screen...
Here at my university we currently use BIG JAVA (but not so fond of it. someway too technical for beginners). The one I used (in french) was called Le Grand Livre JAVA (editor is Micro Application. I liked it, especially for the Interface programming part)). Many other interesting books exist. again a question of personal choice and style.
As people said before in this thread, Sun website is full of tutorials... One other good source is JGURU (just have to google it).
Finally, just don t give up at the beginning, programming (especially with JAVA) is not that arsh. Just have to understand how it works.
Hope this helps.