Hi there
My wife is retraining on to JAVA and at present is coding very much at the command line level, ie no IDE or any kind of help at all.

Could some of you JAVA people give your opinions on the best IDE's to use and why ,and if possible where I could get hold of a trial copy.

Many thanks

Both Eclipse and Netbeans are very good. I prefer the eclipse format.

JCreator is my all time favorite...very nice, and to the point programming. The only "bad" thing is that there is no RAD. But that's nothing to cry over. And it's free http://www.jcreator.com/
or if you're willing to shell out some $$ JBuilder is very very nice as well. Get it at http://www.borland.com/

For a beginner, Java Sun One Editor is a good IDE to use. its very powerfull and not intimidating at all. very good auto-complete aides and beautiful syntax highlighting. u won't go back to the command line again.