Hi tony,
Although my friend above has answered the question I thought id give a little bit more info. Firstly, if by your own admission are a novice, then use SE. I'm not a novice and I rarely use EE. I will when I'm working on larger projects though.
The sort of things you get are added security features, directory services so that software can look up a resource that it needs anywhere in the enterprise, a big and compicated component model for adding reuse and all sorts of other goodies that allows the
java developer to scale applications to the largest possible sizes.
The emphasis is on Enterprise - not small business or tinkerer. The Standard edition gives all we need to make make even fairly large applications - database connections,
Servlets,
JSP's/ Swing and so on. Have some fun with SE first. I've been using it for 4 years and I'm only just starting to learn EE. I'll still use SE more often than not though unless I start work for a large company
Simon