If you are looking at learning the programming by yourself, you should seriously consider starting with a barebones IDE like blueJ instead of a full-fledged IDE like Netbeans... With Netbeans, many code snippets are automatically added to help you code faster, but such facility will not be available with blueJ. This way, you will be doing a lot more coding by yourself and thereby learning better...
Get some good tutorials from sun java site, they are handy.