>I found the best book to be google
Yes but sometimes you need a flow to what you are reading which is hard to get given the fact that you are looking up different articles written by different authors scattered all over the internet.
Also when you read different articles by different authors you would sometimes find them contradicting each other a bit, because every author has hos own style, his beliefs his own "best practices" etc,
I am not saying that this isn't a good way, yes it is, but for a beginner not a preferred way to begin with.

>I hate how resource hungry some java programs can be
Thats the thing from the Ice age. Now Java can really be as fast and efficient as some of the native language code.

>I did some searching around and found two books
Hmmm... Did you not search the sticky thread at the start of the forum ? It lists some good books for Java too and they really are worth.

I personally haven't read any of the books mentioned, I haven't even heard the name of Big Java before, I found Bruce Eckel's Thinking in Java quite good.

Absolute Java is a good beginner's book. It covers the concepts with simplicity and clarity, and goes in depth enough that you can explore the concepts further on your own without too much trouble.

I personally recommend Head First Java.

I'm currently learning from a book called Data Structures Using Java 5.0 by Nicholas J. DeLillo. It's a great book with lots of great examples.

I found the best book to be google and the best tutorials to be whatever the mind can conceptualize into the digital world.

I have been writing software since the 6th grade (C++ and Java more recently) and I must say I learned the most when I took every day computing tasks and wrote applications to solve the problems.

Java is a very neat language in that you can very easily get up and running with it given you've got the time and patience to do so (almost contradictory I know haha )

Given a good compiler (NetBeans or Eclipse) you can begin serving JSP and servlet based applications almost immediately and can go spiraling up from there.

So to make a long bloated story short, find something you like to do on your computer or something you find boring enough - and write a solution to it.

I started with files manipulation: moving files, searching for content, manipulating contents...etc and progressed from there. I've since dived into servlet applications, image meta data manipulation, service bus implementations, student loan calculators, database administration applications, multi-threaded apps, web sniffers / harvesters...etc

You never know where the fingers will take you

I have Java How to Program 6th edition and I really like it. It takes reader from simple basic of console programming to GUIs, drawing, databases, web development (6th edition compare to 7th is missing on AJAX, but I prefer 6th explanation on JSP and servlets), networking and introduction to threads. Progress through book is followed by UML topics based on currently explained topic in the book. I never read the whole book I guess somewhere around 1/3 it was more of jumping between various topics because of my school teaching path, but I consider it as good learning resource plus attached CD is usually loaded with interesting things

Thanks for the recommendation but I did say that I didn't really like it And yes, I did read it a little...

i would suggest Big Java by horstman among those two books....
and as you are a beginner you should prefer core java by horstman
that is a very good book for beginners(i personally following that book) ....