At the moment, if you are just learning, neither.

Learn how to write programs using a simple tet editor (with syntax highlighting, maybe), while compiling, executing, and packaging from the command line. Once you have a good grip on all of that, then it would be a good idea to start worrying about an IDE.

and at that time, you should just try several and decide for yourself...

Personally I think neither is all that good, but Eclipse is better than Netbeans overall (though for someone in the early stages of their journey through lalaland the only difference that really matters is the performance, as Netbeans is terribly slow).

Personally, I like Eclipse. Certainly better than NetBeans. These guys are right though, you don't really need 2 learning curves at once.

As a first tool, I'd recommend TextPad. It's mostly text editor with a lil'bit of IDE mixed in.
http://www.textpad.com/index.html
http://www.textpad.com/support/faq/java.html

I found Netbeans easier to learn than Eclipse.

Jwenting, didn't netbeans 5.0 fix much of the speed issues?

TextPad is a decent starting point. It keeps things simple and shouldn't cause any confusion.

No, it didn't.
Maybe 5.5 does, but a colleague just tried it this week at work (and that was 5.5) and it was hideously slow.

2.6GHz machine, 1.5GB RAM, just displaying the open file dialog took several minutes.
Changing directories in the thing took long enough to go get a cup of coffee and drink it.

He didn't get around to opening and editing files, the day was over before Netbeans got around to that...

My experiences with 5.0 on similar hardware are identical or worse.

IntelliJ flies on my machines which have identical specs to that one. Eclipse works reasonably fast as well.

Both are also written in Java...

my processor is 1.6 (duo core) with a gig of ram and i used netbeans 5.0 and 5.5 and it wasn't slow, loading the program took the longest and around 10 seconds.. but opening files etc took the same time as opening them in word.

buut, Netbeans flickered, quite a bit.. anyone else have that problem?

>Changing directories in the thing took long enough to go get a cup of coffee and drink it.

I admit neatbeans is slow to start, but I've not had much speed problems when actually in it. Eclipse appears to be slightly faster though. And all in all, for GUI builders I prefer eclipse over netbeans now.

However, cclipse and netbeans are bloated much like Visual Studio - but then you would expect that with GUI builders and all the other features they offer etc.

@Phaelex, what parts of netbeans did you find easier to use than netbeans. Just wonderin.