This tutorial jumps right in to the power of Java without dragging you through the history of the language itself.
1: The Genius of Java 2: A Recursive-Descent Expression Parser 3: Implementing Language Interpreters in Java 4: Creating a Download Manager in Java 5: Implementing an E-mail Client in Java 6: Crawling the Web with Java 7: Rendering HTML with Java 8: Statistics, Graphing, and Java 9: Financial Applets and Servlets 10: AI-Based Problem Solving