Theoretically speaking "Notepad" or "Vi" is good enough for coding.
BUT, you must learn, at least one good editor to program your logic fast enough to meet the deadlines, you will get in your professional career.
Eclipse or NetBeansIDE are good
, and they are free.
Try to use the debugging features of your IDE, as it is very useful when you need to deal with complex flow.
Eclipse specific features to learn :-
Getting started with the Eclipse Workbench: Perspectives, views and editors
Working effectively with the Eclipse JDT
Adding
unit tests with
JUnit, logging with log4j
Team development with
Ant and CVS
Plugins for
J2EE including the Sysdeo
Tomcat plugin
...and more
This
book is good enough to start with.
All the best