Do I need Visual Cafe/JBuilder/VisualAge etc to learn Java?
No, you could easily do the whole learning thing with just the JDK as it comes at the back of one of the certification books, or downloading from Sun. However the debugger that comes with the JDK is fairly awful, so you could benefit from one of these tools. If money is tight you can get very functional versions of these tools either from the cover disks of magazines or downloading from the web. An example of this is that Borland/Inprise had a copy of JBuilder 1 on the cover of a magazine in the UK around about the time JBuilder 2 came out. Beware that Microsoft J++ is not utterly compatible with that used by everyone else. It might be useful for getting extra performance for windows apps, but you can worry about that once you truly know the language.
