Have written some fairly big applications at work, an eBay checker and numerous other screen-scraper and other internet-related programs. Java is now the language I am mostly likely to use for a given project. Most recently my Mobile Streetmap. I really like Java but I have to admit it's not as free as I would like and C# is probably slightly better (but even less free). Best book on Java for bringing you on is Effective Java by Joshua Bloch (which I note I was a bit less complimentary about a year ago when I wasn't quite ready for it or hadn't quite absorbed its lessons). Have been teaching Java to some people at work and I'm going to write (yet another) tutorial/training course for three of them starting tomorrow.
Moving my Java knowledge on a bit now I bought the (quite dry but fundamentally correct) Effective Java from Sun themselves and the excellent (and slightly more relaxed) Java Cookbook from O'Reilly. I particularly reccommend the O'Reilly book for moving on from a beginner level
Well, I never did get to the end of the Thinking In Java 'book' but I do seem to have learnt Java somehow. I got Java 2 from Scratch which I couldn't get into and also a Java Servlets book (which was somewhat better). My advice after all this is that you need an app that you want to write and then use the API documentation and the Sun Java Tutorial to get the information you need (both of which are available for download from Sun's java site
You can get the slightly unorthodox 'Thinking in Java' free (in HTML format) from Bruce Eckel's website (he's the author). Its a proper, recognised, 'Learning Java'-type book which gets good reviews at Amazon and so on
If you do download (or buy) the book, there is a Yahoo! group (of which I am a member) set up to work through it together. You can join below
If you view the source of this page you'll see whatever you type in goes straight to Yahoo! so obviously I won't be using your email address for any nefarious purposes
<% Call WriteStandardFooter() End Sub Call Main() %>