>Did you learn JAVA own your own or did you take a class?

I took a JCC class.

>I thought MS J++ was dead.

I haven't seen the J++ obituary :-) (of course it comes with Visual studio), however if you stay away from the MS superset you will be ok... (It's much easier to learn since you have similar tools avail. as VFP (ie: trace window, help by pressing F1, etc.)

I still compiled and executed the files within Sun's Java compiler (in DOS) just to make sure I understood it's usage and compatibity. (seemed to work fine for me).