Hi Darpa,

I would probably start with a text editor of your choice (I like
EditPlus) and use the programs like javac that come with your jdk
distribution to compile your programs.
IDE's (Eclipse, NetBeans, etc) are a tough thing to understand if you
dont really know what you are doing yet.

Also a good beginner site is that'll teach you from the very beginning
is:

http://library.thinkquest.org/11537/

--Joe

P.S. Being a beginner doesnt make you dumb.

Hmm.  Is your problem with Eclipse, or with Java programming?  It's not
clear from what you wrote.

If Java, then the Java Tutorial (Google will find it) is very good.  
Also, you'll want a good book at some point.  If you've programmed
before, check out "Java Precisely", and expect to spend a lot more time
than the 140-page length of the book would lead you to believe.  
Otherwise, Bruce Eckel's "Thinking in Java" has always been a good place
to start.  Don't try to get by without a book, ESPECIALLY if this is
your first programming language.  Books are certainly cheap, anyway,
compared to your time.

If Eclipse, then I don't know a good source to learn it better.  It's
always seemed pretty straight-forward to me, although I'm still
constantly learning more that I don't know about the more exotic
capabilities and available plugins.  You could try asking specific
questions.

In either case: (a) there isn't really a "mood" that will help
everything make sense; you just have to learn it; and (b) don't say that
you're dumb.  That kind of psychological defense mechanism prevents you
from taking chances or trying things out, and it will cause you to spend
ten times as long learning as you could otherwise get away with.  I'm
sure you aren't any more dumb than most people learning a new language.

Hi Darpa,

Have you checked out the http://java.sun.com/ website? They have a
section specifically tailored for newcomers to the Java platform. It can
be found at:

 http://java.sun.com/developer/onlineTraining/new2java/index.html

Also, you can find on line the book: "the Java Tutorial" at:

 http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/index.html

This book is now in it's third edition, and I found it very good.

Both links can also be found from the learning section in left-side menu
 of the http://java.sun.com/ website. If you haven't downloaded the
Java JDK (the Java Development Kit) yet, you can get it also there.

Have Fun!

Darpa schrieb:

Hi,

are you a beginner at Java only or is it your very first programming
language? If the latter is true (which I assume), I would strongly
recommend you to reconsider your decision to chose Java as first
programming language.
Maybe some guys here would have me killed for that, but in my opinion
Java is a terrible language for absolute beginners. It is very powerful
and easy to learn and handle because of its high abstraction level _if
you know what you're doing_, but to really understand how Java (or
similar languages such as C#) works you should already have some basic
concept of object-oriented programming because the high degree of
abstraction can be quite dangerous for beginners. For instance, Java
makes no syntactical difference between static and dynamic objects (in
fact, it doesn't know static objects at all). This is perfectly o.k. for
practical use but can make it harder for beginners to understand object
oriented concepts such as polymorphism; and, of course, the garbage
collector (which is a great thing in itself) makes you forget about
memory management.
Therefore, I would recommend to learn a more "traditional" programming
language such as Objective Pascal or even C++ first - I know the latter
is quite hard to learn, but once you've understood object-oriented
programming in C++, Java and the likes will be a piece of cake; and -
more importantly - you really know what you are doing, because C++
forces you to actually think about everything.

So much about my opinion on this matter; before anybody starts flaming
me, please be reminded that this is just my opinion, no more, no less; I
don't make any claims of truth or whatsoever.

Regards,
Chris

If you are new to Java and if you are not not in a hurry, I'd suggest
getting a good book and working your way through it before jumping to
writing code that you'll regret :-) Here is a freebie
http://www.mindview.net/Books/TIJ/

If you are new to programing as a whole, I've found that for some people
really worked to start from here: http://diveintopython.org/