Learning java with no programming language experience, where to start?

[Peeda]

I'm gonna second Python a choice for just banging out some small apps. Theres a decent free online book called dive into python at diveintopython.org but maybe that might be slightly too advanced for you.

Don't bother with Java I'd think. The bad thing about Java is that its relatively fickle and requires you to jump through tons of hoops and write down tons of extra "boilerplate" code. You're not going to understand why you need to do all these weird things till you learn a bunch of higher level concepts so the first one or two months of using Java will sort of be a confusing haze. Java is also a bit tedious.

With higher level languages like Python stuff tends to "just work" more and you can sort of just copy and modify stuff easier by googling for examples, and also get more instant feedback since you don't have to compile.