Your question is frequently asked. Use Google to search this newsgroup
for previous in-depth answers covering tutorials, books, courses etc

I recommend you download Eclipse or NetBeans, buy a book or two and
start reading Sun's tutorial at
http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/java/index.html

A good place to start is the Sun Java tutorials at
http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/index.html

rossum

_Learning Java_ by O'Reilly is the best book I have found for starting Java.

Javapassion website is run by a Sun employee and researcher, Sang Shin,
who has free online courses.  The Introductory course would be best for
you (the second link).

http://www.javapassion.com/
http://www.javapassion.com/javaintro/

Sun's tutorials are OK but not great to try to learn from.  After you
get a bit of the basics from Javapassion and _Learning Java_ you can use
the tutorials to expand your knowledge.

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

Finally, you can look up Javadoc for Java classes on Google.  Append "se
6" to the search to get the latest Javadoc.  (Mine comes up SE 1.4.2 or
1.3 if I don't.)  For example:

<http://www.google.com/search?q=java+string+se+6>

Good luck.

see http://mindprod.com/jgloss/gettingstarted.html
--

Roedy Green Canadian Mind Products
The Java Glossary
http://mindprod.com