Seriously Good Software

Chapter 2. Reference implementation

This chapter covers

• Using standard collections
• Creating diagrams to illustrate a software design
• Expressing performance in big-O notation
• Estimating the memory footprint of a class

In this chapter, you’ll examine a version of the Container class that strikes a good balance between different qualities, such as clarity, efficiency, and memory usage.

As you recall from section 1.7, I made the assumption that storing and maintaining the set of indirect connections between containers would suffice. In practice, you do this by equipping each container with a reference to the collection of containers directly or indirectly connected to it, called its group. Being familiar with the Java Collections Framework (JCF) ...