I believe that the teacher was telling him to start with Java because it's one of the more rigorous languages (in respect to introductory languages). I myself initially started with learning Java in high school and after leaning it, other languages such as C++ (which is the mainstream language in college) became a walk in the park.
Java throws you straight into critical, complex ideals such as classes and objects (since it is very OOP oriented), resulting in over preparing you for related topics such as inheritance and other friend functions.
O'Reilly has very good books out (I've learned C++, HTML, Java and Javascript from their books) and they do a very good job in explaining things. Also, Lynda has a lot of tutorial videos that...