Basic Collections

Collection Implementations

Classes that implement the collection interfaces typically have names of the form <Implementation-style><Interface>. The general purpose implementations are summarized in the table below:

		Implementations
		Hash Table	Resizable Array	Balanced Tree	Linked List	Hash Table + Linked List
Interfaces	Set	HashSet		TreeSet		LinkedHashSet
	List		ArrayList		LinkedList
	Map	HashMap		TreeMap		LinkedHashMap

From Java 5 Collections Overview

• The Collections classes use Generics to allow you to specify the types that can be stored in the collection.

• Before Generics, everything in a collection was an Object. This lead to complicated (and buggy) code since you could not rely on the objects being a specific type.