houbou's Journal: Java where to start?

I'm a web developer who has design and programming experience. So, VB, ASP, PHP, Coldfusion, Perl, even C and C++ I have in my belt. I also use Dreamweaver and/or do a lot of my HTML/XHTML/JavaScript coding by hand. So, the DOM, DHTML, etc... all good to me and even OOP thinking and design I have when I code. And I even have MySQL and other databases, again, not an issue here.

So, my weak point is.. Java... I see so many jobs out there with J2EE, Hibernate, Eclipse, Netbeans and all that uh.. java.. :) But beside the obvious, which is to learn Java the core language, I don't know where else to go from there.

There is so much!

So, I humbly ask the knowledgeable and competent readers of Slashdot for help..

What should I read? in what order? what are the software I require? UML? Swing? I mean, what is the curriculum required for someone to say they are a solid Java developer? Database? etc... Where to start? even assuming I have to go through Java itself, what are the good books out there?

Thanks!

Suggestion

[metamatic]

Download OpenJDK and Eclipse. Get a copy of O'Reilly's "Java in a Nutshell" and learn the core language. Make sure you learn Junit and the built-in Java logging classes, plus generics from Java 5. If you want to learn UML, pick up "UML Distilled" by Fowler.

Once you're done with that, you might want to learn Swing or J2EE. I'd skip learning any frameworks. It might be worth learning how to automate builds with Ant so you have an alternative to Eclipse.