The Java Tutorial Fourth Edition: A Short Course on the Basics

Chapter 11. Collections THIS chapter describes the Java Collections Framework. Here you will learn what collections are and how they can make your job easier and programs better. You'll learn about the core elementsinterfaces, implementation...

Introduction to Collections A collectionsometimes called a containeris simply an object that groups multiple elements into a single unit. Collections are used to store, retrieve, manipulate, and communicate aggregate data. Typically, they represen...

Interfaces The core collection interfaces encapsulate different types of collections, which are shown in Figure 11.1. These interfaces allow collections to be manipulated independently of the details of their representation. Core collection interf...

Implementations Implementations are the data objects used to store collections, which implement the interfaces described in the Interfaces section (page 295). This section describes the following kinds of implementations: General-purpose implemen...

Algorithms The polymorphic algorithms described here are pieces of reusable functionality provided by the Java platform. All of them come from the Collections class, and all take the form of static methods whose first argument is the collection on...

Custom Collection Implementations Many programmers will never need to implement their own Collections classes. You can go pretty far using the implementations described in the preceding sections of this chapter. However, someday you might want to ...

Interoperability In this section, you'll learn about the following two aspects of interoperability: Compatibility: This subsection describes how collections can be made to work with older APIs that predate the addition of Collections to the Java ...