I always learn new frameworks best the low-level-way.
- Learning a new programming language has proven to be the the best for me if I had to compile source files with the command line. Using an IDE like xCode makes it significant more hard to understand the basics.
- I had a very hard way of learning to understand basic concepts of the Eclipse platform, because nearly all tutorials just tell you were to click in the Eclipse GUI. No up-to-date tutorial told what lines to add to what XML file and how the things belong together. Fortunately, this was much simpler for Swing.
Hence my recommendation: don't use a GUI builder for learning, because it hides all the important things which help to really understand what's going on. Use a good Java/Swing tutorial and start typing your applications. After you understand the basics, you can use a GUI builder for prototyping.
