i suggest you remove gcj and use another jdk
see
http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/de...-faq/ch11.html
i suggest the latest jdk from sun, ibm or blackdown
for the editors vim, emacs or eclipse
adding java and javac to your path won't hurt : bashrc , .cshrc or zshrc for whichever shell you use.
if you understand well the concept of classes packages, javabeans, inheritance, classes, interfaces you won't have any problems learning faster when you'll try to build your own applications.
java swing is not that easy but is worth it for gui applications
jakarta is a good place for the server stuff(dynamic web pages)
java is case sensitive like in unix.