Recipe 7.16 Finally, Collections

Problem

You're having trouble keeping track of all these lists, sets, and iterators.

Solution

There's a pattern to it. See Figure 7-3 and Table 7-2.

Discussion

Figure 7-3, in the fashion of the package-level class diagrams in the O'Reilly classic Java in a Nutshell, shows the collection-based classes from package java.util.

Figure 7-3. The Collections Framework

See Also

The Javadoc documentation on Collections, Arrays, List, Set, and the classes that implement them provides more details than there's room for here. Table 7-2 may further help you to absorb the regularity of the Collections Framework.

Table 7-2. Java collections

Implementations
Interfaces	Resizable array	Hashed table	Linked list	Balanced tree
Set		HashSet		TreeSet
List	ArrayList, Vector		LinkList
Map		HashMap, HashTable		TreeMap