A free course on the basics of Java is provided by Microsoft, written by in-house employees. It comprises twenty-one YouTube videos and a Github repo where the associated exercises reside. 

The videos are deliberately short as they are targeted at complete beginners, But don't let that discourage you because the content is well presented is on modern Java can aid in freshening up the concepts for the more experienced audiences.

The introductory video, 'What is Java' does a good job in disambiguating Java the language from Java the platform. It also mentions the recently acquired Native executable options and  serves as a quick birds-eye overview.

Talking about modern material, the second video is on the Jshell read-evaluate-print loop, which

is a technology that's really great for beginners because it strips out all of the other noise that you don't have to worry about with Java and lets you focus just on the code.It's even more lean than the leanest IDE you can possibly imagine.

After the next video, 'Prototype your Java with Jshell' which hosts examples leveraging its usage, we switch to VSCode in 'Working with Java in Visual Studio Code'. That video shows how to install the IDE ,how to navigate all the menus and how to push your project to the Azure Cloud, that way introducing the promotional aspect of the series.

As a side note, last year I covered another free course by Microsoft 'Learn How To Do Java On Azure' in which you learn how to build , migrate and scale Java applications on Azure. Of course, it's a promotional item attracting Java developers to the Azure platform, but that doesn't take away from its general educational benefit. It certainly was a much more advanced counterpart since :

along with Azure you get to grips with Java's ecosystem by using popular tools and frameworks like Spring boot , Tomcat and Gradle. You also get an insight into recent technologies. For example in the unit "Types of Java applications" we learn the differences between Monolithic applications , Microservices , Batch jobs and Serverless apps.

Returning to the new beginner-oriented offering, after setting everything up the rest of the videos cover several language features with a break looking at 'Maven and other Build Tools for Java':

• Working with Strings in Java
• Formatting Java Strings – Part 1
• Formatting Java Strings – Part 2
• Working with Numeric Data Types in Java
• All about Java Records – Part 1
• All about Java Records – Part 2
• Conditional Logic in Java
• Arrays in Java
• Java Collections
• Working with Java Maps
• Working with Loops in Java
• Maven and other Build Tools for Java
• Java Classes and Packages Part 1
• Java Classes and Packages Part 2
• Java Classes and Packages Part 3
• Java Methods part 1
• Java Methods Part 2

As already said, the videos are short and feature Microsoft employees who work with Java and who share their experience going through the concepts of the language and building projects as well as deploying them. They are highly recommended for beginners, but worth a watch even by experienced devs due to covering modern Java and its toolchain.

More Information

Introduction to Java for Beginners on YouTube
GitHub

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