Start with this book. It takes you from the basics of OOP & setting up your working environment thru graphics, streams, and generic programming. A classic.

An alternative to the Core Java book approach for learning basic Java.

Not a tutorial, but a great reference. Getting a little too large to be as useful as the early editions though.

Once you know the basics of Java, get into design patterns. Gamma's treatment is too academic, and this book is very practical.

Learn the correct ways to assemble a Java program. This is not about learning the language but about learning form.

Once you get a taste of Swing in the Core Java books, this is a handy reference more than a tutorial. Swing is a replacement of the AWT with many useful built-in widgets.

Java makes multiplatform computing easy. Core Java touched on the subject, and this book makes you an expert.

Everything from basic threading to features that will be part of Java 1.6. The definitive guide to concurrent programming in Java.

Learn the WHYs of the Java language features (networking, I/O, threading, etc.) from this standard OS text. Illustrative Java code samples are included.

Covers all the technologies needed to program web applications in Java using Servlets 2.3, JSP 1.2, EJB 2.0 and client-side programming with JavaScript. These technologies are explained in the context of real-world projects, such as an e-commerce application, a document management program, file upload and programmable file download, and an XML-based online book project.

This newer book explains EJB 3.0. There are a lot of new concepts explained - Java Persistence, Entity Manager, new behavior and control of transactions in stateful session beans and much more. You will also learn how to work with JBoss application server.

Volume two of the previous book.

Once you understand J2EE building blocks, learn the enterprise design patterns and best practices involved in building an entire application.

About technologies and methods which help bring simplicity back into the world of enterprise Java development. The 3 key technologies covered, the Spring Framework, Hibernate and Eclipse, reduce enterprise Java development complexity. Furthermore, these technologies enable plain old Java objects to be deployed in light-weight containers versus heavy remote objects requiring heavy EJB containers.

Java is an interpreted language running on a virtual machine. Get an idea of the theory behind this.

If you already know Java, this will catch you up with what's new in Java 6 without having to worry about learning the basics all over again. Good explanations and very good code examples.