Did you enjoy coding in core Java? Did you think the IO package was the most fun out of them all ? :) If you answered yes to both then J2EE awaits you... J2EE is purely built for the internet and has vast libraries to support different problems you may encounter. The basics (as I mentioned before)- servlets, jsp and javabeans are the foundations of J2EE. And there are plenty of resources on the net that you can google through. Once you get the grasp of these then you can move onto other more difficult APIs- messaging (JMS), transactions (EJBs), etc. Most programmers find J2EE to be complex (b/c most J2EE projects tend to be enterprise scale). But if you start out with good fundamentals you can move onto one of several frameworks (i.e. Spring, JSF, Struts, Tapestry) or other J2EE component related-tools (i.e. Hibernate, log4J ) to help you demystify the complexity. The best advice I can give you is to learn the fundamentals and design patterns well (including core java!). Then find a part time coding job! Then off you go... Some helpful sites: http://java.sun.com/javaee/reference/tutorials/ http://apache.org/ Good luck!