Java Collections Framework
This tutorial takes you on an extended tour of the Java Collections Framework. The tutorial starts with a few simple programming examples for beginners and experts alike, to get started with the Collections Framework quickly. The tutorial continues with a discussion of sets and maps, their properties, and how their mathematical definition differs from the Set, Map, and Collection definitions within the Collections Framework. A section on the history of Java Collections Framework clears up some of the confusion around the proliferation of set- and map-like classes. This tutorial includes a thorough presentation of all the interfaces and their implementation classes in the Collections Framework. The tutorial explores the algorithm support for the collections, as well as working with collections in a thread-safe and read-only manner. In addition, the tutorial includes a discussion of using a subset of the Collections Framework with JDK 1.1. The tutorial concludes with an introduction of JGL, a widely used algorithm and data structure library from ObjectSpace that predates the Java Collections Framework.
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