That's a pretty good book. Best advice is to do the tutorials and the "big project" at the end and keep coding. I also don't advise using a fancy IDE because not only is their a learning curve a lot of things can be hidden. Here is a good text editor you can trial for free, http://www.textpad.com.
I'm also a big fan of C++, which I learned before Java, which probably made the transition easy. The same people have a book, "How to Program C/C++." Another good read if you're not familiar with oop is "Thinking in C++." My .02