People use Eclipse (or WSAD) everyday, all day.  It does not suck.  It is not notepad, you can't figure it out in 30 seconds.

But, if you really want to know the simplest way to get around.  At first, you probably won't need more than the 'Java' perspective or the 'Java' view.

- Create a project
- Add your java code to the source directory.

Review the 'views' you don't need.  Review the 'Outline' and 'Hierarchy' views.

People who don't understand Eclipse, good for you; go use Visual Studio.  Ask any java developer what they use.  It is either Eclipse:99% of the time, Netbeans 0.00001%, IntelliJ 0.00002%, and Other (VI/Emacs/Etc).

I am debugging this application, right now in it.

www dot citisolutions dot net

>> IntelliJ <<

Gahhh!

I used that POS.  Briefly.
It was all the CTO's idea.

I'm with xampl on IntelliJ.  Just don't like it.

Damn. I think we offended Bot by dissing his IDE.

its a bloody nightmare.  unfortunately I cant stick to the java perspective, its an opensource framework Im hacking so I need to use the synchronize perspective, the debug perspect, its got multiple libraries so I need to get the paths setup correctly, I need to...well, lets just say that the entire fucking interface of the thing is a hideous mess of confusing dialogs and stupid messages.

oh, and its slow.

"oh, and its slow."  It will eventually crash.

The slowness/crashiness wasn't as big an issue for me because I work on a pretty beefy system - P4 dual core w/4 GB RAM - but ...

The prefs system in Eclipse is depressingly bad/hard to use.

It was entirely too much hassle to change the colors/fonts.

My realization that there was no intelligent soft-wrapping of lines (i.e. wrapping long lines at the edge of the screen while preserving indentation) was the final straw for me.

Yeah, some dude started working on it as a Google Summer of Code project, iirc, but his plugin is still highly experimental.

"so I need to use the synchronize perspective..."
I rarely use the synch perspective.  Nine times outta ten you can just use the Team... blah blah functions from the right-click context menu.
Basically, if you think that it's a cumbersome and stupid chore in order to get something done, you're probably doing it in... shall we say, a sub-optimal fashion.