Chapter 10: Collections

Overview

In Chapter 5, “Arrays,” you read information about 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.

List<T> and ArrayList are collection classes that can be compared to arrays. But there are also other kinds of collections: queues, stacks, linked lists, and dictionaries.

This chapter shows you how to work with groups of objects. It takes a close look at these topics:

• Collection interfaces and types

• Lists

• Queues

• Stack

• Linked lists

• Sorted lists

• Dictionaries

• Dictionary with multiple keys

• Bit arrays

• Performance