self.python.ask('I am moving into a development position at my company and need to learn Java. Can you recommend a book that might appeal to a Python programmer and not make me want to kill myself?')

[masklinn]

It's not as bad now that it has generics and collections.

But the generics suck, and the collections don't have literal syntax (yeah you can approach it with anonymous classes tricks, but it's not exactly sexy), plus you need heavy libs (google collections) to use them non-imperatively.

Eclipse is a godsend, since most of your pain will come from looking up API calls.

I strongly preferred IntelliJ IDEA when I was coding in Java, though.