Reddit mentions of Python for Everyone

My suggestion is always to start with Python. It's a very high level language and it's very easy to learn. In fact, Python recently became the most popular language to teach beginners. I know you wanted to learn Java, but there are several things about it that make it not so great for beginners, as well as several things about Python that make it good for beginners (ask why if you're interested, but it may be a bit technical). As a programmer, you will likely learn a dozen or more languages (I've learned over a dozen in school), so saving Java for a bit later isn't really an issue. You'll find in programming that a lot of the important things apply to most languages, so learning these allow you to apply them to new languages quite easily. My university now uses this book in the first year computer science courses.

Get yourself situated with a free GitHub account. GitHub is my favourite version control. If you have a student email you can get a free private repository (so others can't see your stuff). If you don't have a student email to use to get one, you can still make a free account, but it will be public. What that means is that anyone who navigates to your account can see all your code. Since you're just starting out, it shouldn't matter if people browse your code, there's not much to see since it's just you going through the basics. GitHub has a tutorial for new users and also has a user-friendly client that makes it all really simple. You can save the more complex stuff for later until you're comfortable.

Once you've gone through Python and learned a bit, it's time to get into some of the language-independent things. Introduction to Algorithms is an amazing textbook. The authors are some of the most well respected people in the field and I've used it in school in more than one course. You can go through this at any time. I recommend you programming some of the things (they provide some code as well), and perhaps trying this stuff in Java might be a good segway from Python to Java.

C. Horstmann's Python for Everyone is your choice!

If you need hints with the exercises -> https://github.com/syndbg/Books-solutions/tree/master/Python-For-Everyone-Horstmann