Sounds like the opposite of my experience with Java in 1996. I had some great thick book on it (as was the style at the time), and after chapters on language basics, streams, collections, etc, it quickly got on to GUI programming with AWT. AWT is pretty horrible in many ways, but it did make it very easy for a teenage novice to put up a window with some buttons in it, and start drawing lines and text.
I immediately started working on an ambitious space battle game. I got to the point where you could click to set waypoints for a ship, and it would try to fly a course through them, using Newtonian physics, but the navigation was incredibly naive, and always just accelerated towards the next waypoint, so eventually the ship was going so fast it crossed over the waypoint in a single time step, and would turn round and come back to it, inevitably missing is again, and so basically going into perpetual powered orbit around it. I then abandoned the project.
I immediately started working on an ambitious space battle game. I got to the point where you could click to set waypoints for a ship, and it would try to fly a course through them, using Newtonian physics, but the navigation was incredibly naive, and always just accelerated towards the next waypoint, so eventually the ship was going so fast it crossed over the waypoint in a single time step, and would turn round and come back to it, inevitably missing is again, and so basically going into perpetual powered orbit around it. I then abandoned the project.