Well, I see I'm going to run counter to the majority here ;-)
Hand coding GUIs is a pain in the ass. Anything that makes that task easier is a good thing in my book. When you're just starting, having a generated GUI lets you get up and running faster.
GUI builders handle the really repetitive work and prevent you from doing the most common dumb things. The downside is that same approach will also prevent you from doing the really clever things. Eventually, you will encounter something that you cannot do through the GUI builder and you will need to poke into the code. So, you can't treat code generators like black boxes where you don't need to know what magic happens inside. At minimum, you need white boxes. Let the GUI builder do its magic, but understand that magic and its limitations.
Practice by generating a very simple GUI. Walk through the code and understand what it does. Make a change through the builder and see how the generated code changes. Try changing the code yourself to confirm you understanding is correct. *
If you don't understand something, hit the JavaDocs, the Swing Trail, or browse through the Java2S Swing Tutorials.
If you're still stuck try the kind folks at Java Ranch, or here on StackOverflow.
* Netbeans puts the generated code in guarded blocks and will not let you edit them directly. However, you can open the file in another editor to test a change. Also, you can do quite a lot to influence the code generation using the code
tab in the properties
window.