A second vote for BlueJ. The book is reviewed here:
http://www.techbookreport.com/tbr0096.html

Also the Sun tutorial is worth looking at.

pan
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TechBookReport Java http://www.techbookreport.com/JavaIndex.html

I would say that it's not much better than very few, but anyway...

Well, this has become a political debate, and people's politics vary
radically. :)

I strongly believe that in any subject, that *if* one has ambitions beyond a
superficial, lay understanding, *then* one should learn the fundamentals
first.

Your Latin/French example is a good one.  If you want to be able to order a
beer on a two-week vacation in Britanny, then forget the Latin.  If you want
to be able to read and understand French philosophy, you need the Latin.  I
did two years of Latin, and it helped me not one jot in my French and German
exams.  But now I'm older, even my foggy recollections of those two years
inform my understanding of two thousand years of European history, right up
to political and social differences today, not to mention the history of
British mathematics and science, and my lay interest in linguistics.  I only
wish I had some Ancient Greek as well!

(And in the absence of any formal education in English grammar -- my schools
were both a little too progressive in that area -- I thank the stars that I
was made aware of parts of speech in my Latin studies.  Many PROFESSIONAL
writers of English today obviously do not have a grasp of simple grammar --
few can identify a gerund, for example, and as a consequence pretty much
every single news or feature article committed to the page uses an object
pronoun somewhere where a possessive pronoun belongs.  Latin is not the only
route to such understanding, but it does a grand job in the absence of
formal training in English.)

There are fundamentals in programming.  OO is not one of them (and the world
of computer programming did fine without it for 25 years).  GUI is not one
of them.  Where to put and where not to put braces and semicolons is not one
of them, nor are two-dimensional arrays which are actually vectors of
vectors.

Compare:

   class MyClass {
       public static void main(String[] args) {
           System.out.println("Hello World"); } }

with:

   10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD"
   20 END

and tell me which you think helps start someone off with the fundamentals of
programming!

Cheers, Paul