No knowledge of other languages is assumed. Ken Arnold, James Gosling, and David Holmes. The Java Programming Language , 3rd edition, Addison-Wesley, 2000. A much briefer explanation of Java. User interface libraries not discussed.
New edition includes discussion of collection classes.
Java in a Nutshell , 3rd edition, O'Reilly, 1999. A reference book rather than a tutorial. Succinct but covers a lot. Bruce Eckel Thinking in Java , 2nd edition, Prentice-Hall, 2000. It goes into lots of detail on the tricky aspects like GUIs, multithreading, remote method invocation.