Professional C# and .NET, 2021st Edition

8Collections

WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Understanding collection interfaces and types
• Working with lists, queues, and stacks
• Working with linked and sorted lists
• Using dictionaries and sets
• Evaluating performance
• Using immutable collections

CODE DOWNLOADS FOR THIS CHAPTER

The source code for this chapter is available on the book page at www.wiley.com. Click the Downloads link. The code can also be found at https://github.com/ProfessionalCSharp/ProfessionalCSharp2021 in the directory 1_CS/Collections.

The code for this chapter is divided into the following major examples:

• ListSamples
• QueueSample
• LinkedListSample
• SortedListSample
• DictionarySample
• SetSample
• ImmutableCollectionsSample

All the projects have nullable reference types enabled.

OVERVIEW

Chapter 6, “Arrays,” covers arrays and the interfaces implemented by the Array class. The size of arrays is fixed. If the number of elements is dynamic, you should use a collection class instead of an array.

List<T> is a collection class that can be compared to arrays, but there are also other kinds of collections: queues, stacks, linked lists, dictionaries, and sets. The other collection classes have partly different APIs to access the elements in the collection and often a different internal structure for how the items are stored in memory. This chapter covers all of these collection classes and their differences, including performance differences.

COLLECTION INTERFACES AND TYPES

Most collection classes are in ...