[slysf]

My advice would be to dive in. If you've learned a solid base of C++ and have built some apps then I'd look for an open source Java app that does something along the lines of what you've done in C++. Given the many references online you should be able to walk through the source code and figure out how they got to the same result. I know this is a sort of "reverse engineering" approach to development but it really forces you to look at what they're doing instead of the usual tutorials in programming books that bear little relevance to real world applications. This is a great technique to use in conjunction with more traditional learning methods (books/tutorials/websites.) Hope this helps!