Ivor Horton's Beginning Java™ 2, JDK™ 5th Edition

10.4. Buffers

All the classes that define buffers have the abstract Buffer class as a base. The Buffer class therefore defines the fundamental characteristics common to all buffers. A particular buffer can store a sequence of elements of a given type, and an element can be of any primitive data type other than boolean. Thus, you can create buffers to store byte values, char values, short values, int values, long values, float values, or double values. The following classes in the java.nio package define these buffers:

Class	Description
ByteBuffer	A buffer that stores values of type byte. You can also store the binary values of any of the other primitive types in this buffer, except for type boolean. Each binary value that you store will occupy a number of bytes in the buffer determined by the type—values of type char or short will occupy 2 bytes, int values will occupy 4 bytes, and so on. Only buffers of this type can be used in a file I/O operation.
CharBuffer	A buffer that stores only values of type char
ShortBuffer	A buffer that stores only values of type short
IntBuffer	A buffer that stores only values of type int
LongBuffer	A buffer that stores only values of type long
FloatBuffer	A buffer that stores only values of type float
DoubleBuffer	A buffer that stores only values of type double

I keep repeating "except for type boolean" every so often, so I had better address that. The various types of buffers provide only for the numerical data types, and type boolean does not fit into this category. ...