Journal Zarf's Journal: Java where to start? 1
As someone who's just moved to Java myself... I suggest starting here: http://grails.org the Grails framework will get you started in Java based web development and you can learn more diving deeper into Java as you get more and more proficient. Grails is built on Spring which is a Java Enterprise platform but Grails saves you from having to learn all those "enterprisey" bits. Instead Grails picks defaults that are the most sensible for web development.
As you get better you can graduate to adding your own features to the framework or even beginning to use the more advanced Java frameworks outside Grails tying everything back together using Spring's IoC and Java JNDI. Or you can keep things light weight and web2.0 by using various remoting technologies inside Grails. It's a quick way to learn that doesn't put training wheels on you.
Get going in an afternoon... scale out using Java as your project grows.
Frameworks, frameworks, everywhere... (Score:1)
When I had to learn Java for my first job, I learned it the old-fashioned way, via Sun's online tutorials. (Which were excellent, BTW.) But now there's all kinds of frameworks, and it presents a number of problems.
I think not learning the core language first, solidly, but instead jumping right to abstraction layers/being near-immediately productive, is a shame. I'm reminded for example of the considerable segment of Windows devs who learned MFC but never learned writing an app the manual way to just the Win