That was my experience with Java. I knew C++ and I was able to start coding on Java almost immediately, for me Java was semantic subset of C++. Of course I had some books and checked out things here and there and, of course, Eclipse was of tremendous help to me, but I never did Java learning as a specific activity.

That was Java 5, though. And frameworks is a different story either, I spent lots of time trying to figure out what J2EE is.