Well, let me give you a quick history of my prior programming history. I was twelve years old, and in shock and awe of video games, and like many countless others I ventured forth trying to figure out what made them tick, and make my own. So, I taught myself C++, started to mess around with OpenGL and Direct X, and kept it up for a few years...and then I burned out.

Fast forward to today, I'm 16 years old and I'm about to take a Computer Science college course online, and so I thought I might as well get started early. I've already installed the SDK and NetBeans, and I'm just looking on tips on where to start with Java.

Any tutorials or books you would recommend?

I would recommend using Eclipse instead of NetBeans, but that's just me. I've been able to find more help with Eclipse, and they have a graphical editor for when you're making GUI applications.

I think when I first started learning Java, I started out with applets.
I just googled a bunch of tutorials about them, and started trying to make some games.

After a while, I ended up with stuff like you can find here, if my site is up when you try the link(I don't find the time to post very much.)
(Use the .html pages)

Java is a lot like C++, but it's a little limited, and you only have to compile once and it will work on any operating system with Java installed.

You should learn about threads, and try to pick a good API to get started with for making applications.

If you look around enough, like I did, you can find a way to do pretty much anything with Java.

(For the Ex3dApplet, if you can get on my site, you hold CTRL and drag the mouse to turn the view, SHIFT+CTRL and drag slides it around, and ALT+CTRL and drag zooms. Or some combination of those. I haven't played with it an a while, so I'm not sure. And if you play around with the keys, you can figure out the rest of the controls.)