Java™ How to Program, Seventh Edition

19.1. Introduction

In Chapter 17, we discussed how to create and manipulate data structures. The discussion was “low level” in the sense that we painstakingly created each element of each data structure dynamically and modified the data structures by directly manipulating their elements and the references to their elements. In this chapter, we consider the Java collections framework, which contains prepackaged data structures, interfaces and algorithms for manipulating those data structures. Some examples of collections are the cards you hold in a card game, your favorite songs stored in your computer, the members of a sports team and the real-estate records in your local registry of deeds (which map book numbers and page numbers to property ...