
Interested in learning Java.
Ebooks, people.
Herbert Schildt writes a few good books you may buy in a bookstore, and like usual ripped in to ebooks. Though, "hands-on" is the eye of the beholder. I find "hands-on" to be anything practical. Meaning, coding the examples in the book, or writing your own project is hands-on, but can be extremely boring at times.
The Sun Java documentation is basing itself around theory to make sure you understand what you're doing first. Then, it starts to move in to the core skills, and beyond that (AWT, Swing etc).