Core Java™ 2 Volume II - Advanced Features, Seventh Edition

Concrete Collections

Rather than getting into more details about all the interfaces, we thought it would be helpful to first discuss the concrete data structures that the Java library supplies. Once we have thoroughly described the classes you might want to use, we will return to abstract considerations and see how the collections framework organizes these classes. Table 2-1 shows the collections in the Java library and briefly describes the purpose of each collection class. (For simplicity, we omit the thread-safe collections that were discussed in Chapter 1.) All classes in Table 2-1 implement the Collection interface, with the exception of the classes with names ending in Map. Those classes implement the Map interface instead. We will discuss ...