Well I know basic Java and wanted to learn Swing so of course looked at the Sun website first, where this tutorial is. I was going to start it but realised it relied heavily on NetBeans, which I'm not sure about.

I'm not sure because it's learning that I want to acheive, not a nice looking program.

So I thought using NetBeans like this would be great once I know it, but I don't want to be building things without a clue what's going on underneath, and of course this could also cause problems later.

My first question is is this the right way to do it, should I try not to rely on an IDE heavily? Looking through questions on the site most people recommend using the Sun tutorial, and I've only seen one answer that agrees with what I'm thinking, and they linked to this resource which looks promising. Or perhaps I'm getting the wrong idea of the Sun tutorial, perhaps it doesn't rely on the IDE, it just seemed like that.

My second question is, if you agree with me, what resources (apart from the one above) would you recommend?

Thanks for your answers.