Maximum PC

Alright guys I'm going to college next year and need to be packing some java knowledge with me. First off I need a reccomendation for a good beginner how-to book for basic java. I went through the programmer resource thread and was happy too see a lot of java links and that a lot of you know java, this will come in handy for the 7849013 questions I'll have for you guys. Also what stuff should I download from Sun? Theres a lot of stuff on their downloads page and I dont even know where to start. So assuming I know nothing and have nothing get me to the point of being able to start myself off. Thanks guys!

i need to know what your running, for i can post the link to the dl for you.
2) DO NOT USE BETA'S IVE HAD MY COMPUTER CRASHED BECAUSE OF IT.
3) for the basic guides or knowledge of java i recommend going to http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/index.html and using that as a beginners guide to it.
WARNING DO NOT BUY THE BOOK CALLED "head first java" if you need one type of format to learn. when in college i had to use this book, and it totaly lost me.

You're going to want to download the latest jdk from java.sun.com - not a jre.

While you're there click on tutorials on the left side and read 'my first cup of Java'. There are many excellent tutorials and white pages here on this site.

An excellent free book is Thinking in Java. Another excellent book is Effective Java, not really a beginners book though.

You're also going to want a good IDE. I hhighly recommend NetBeans 4.1 which has won a few awards now.

Be sure to post any questions.

My two favorite beginning Java books were:

Learning Java by Patrick Niemeyer
The Java(TM) Programming Language (3rd Edition) by Ken Arnold

They complemented each other well, emphasizeing different aspects of the langage.

there are a number of tutorials you can get online...
probably even from your own university...
try going to your school's cs dept, and checking prof's
pages... in many cases they will have notes from
years past online...

ie. http://www.cs.miami.edu/~geoff/Courses/ ... 3/Content/

but other than that i would recommend the tut that lonewulf put up...

also im assuming you're going into CS.... i would recommend learning
unix if you havent already as it is common in most computer science depts

later