Netbeans Or Eclipse
 

I want to program in Java and I was looking at the IDE, Netbeans and Eclipse.

Which one will you recommend and why??

Ah, there is no answer for that, really. It is like asking which one is better: Gnome or KDE, Vim or Emacs... etc. My suggestion is: try both and see which one you enjoy most. Only you can tell that and both are very simple to download and install. And yes, you can have both installed so...

Personally, I've noticed Eclipse to be far more used in most companies I worked for or that work together with the company I currently work for. Still, Netbeans has out of the box ways to import Eclipse projects, so no big deal there.

Out of the box, however, Netbeans has a few advantages over Eclipse, such as a great GUI editor and a useful search feature. Installing plugins is relatively easier in Netbeans, but it is not hard either on Eclipse. It is just less practical in Eclipse.

If you are interested in developing web applications, Netbeans also comes out of the box with better support for that, including, but not limited to, two webservers. Again, getting eclipse to do the same is not hard either.

Well, my advice is for you to try them both. Years ago, Eclipse was indeed the de-facto Open source, free Java IDE to have. But Netbeans closed that gap very well to the point that any deeper comparison will turn into a personal point of view discussion.