I would advise starting off with a good Java book and writing code in a text editor for a week or two before migrating to JDeveloper. It might seem masochistic, but the steep curve pays off later. As for the book, "Java: The Complete Reference (9th Edition)" by Herbert Schildt was recently launched and covers the latest version of Java (Java 8). "Thinking in Java (4th Edition)" by Bruce Eckel is also good, but requires a fair amount of programming experience in other languages.

As for SQL, a short book called "SQL in 10 minutes" by Ben Forta is quite good. Despite it's cheesy sounding name, it is a great resource to get up and running quickly. Not in 10 minutes though. Also (forgive the shameless plug) you can refer to my short ebook "A Primer on SQL", free to read and download.

https://leanpub.com/aprimeronsql/

Since this is a bout Java and SQL in particular, I can only recommend our jOOQ blog, as we're heavily blogging about the two topics:

http://blog.jooq.org

Other good resources can be found in this top 100 list of Java blogs (not really containing 100 items, though):

http://www.programcreek.com/2012/11/top-100-java-developers-...

Oracle's Java tutorials are pretty cool, too:

http://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/index.html

And this excellent SQL blog:

http://use-the-index-luke.com/

Id suggest "Thinking in Java", "Effective Java" and to get OCJP training material and start doing that.

Can you implement the 10 guesses game? You know, computer picks a number between 1-100 and asks you to guess, then it tells you if its higher or lower. Do this in a simple Java class, static main, play from console.

Then do that same program but this time as a web page and using JSP, for this step itll require a lot. You have to make a Java project in Maven and deploy it in tomcat. THere should be a button to "enter" the guess.

Now when youve done the above exercises, redo it and this time secure it, and use ajax, no page refresh.

Now for the last exercise ask for the users name before gamae begins, and save every game the user plays to a database of your choice, I suggest PostgreSQL, and let any user see what other users played, like a replay of the game.

Make it as ugly and as wrong as you can think, dont care, just do this.

Now when you have done the above and have a webapp made with Java, JSP and simple JDBC, where user can play in its browser, see historical games and so on, add a counter "This many users are playing right now".

Next month, make a computer play the game you made. First code it to play against the console version, then against the web one, you can make an API or WebService to play it.

Now when youre done, come back in a month or two and ask again.