Java Generics and Collections Review

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Java Generics and Collections ReviewThe intent of Generics is make your Java code type-safer. While Java is a strongly typed language, it lacks type-safety when it comes to using collections. Generics were added to the Java programming language in 2004 as part of J2SE 5.0. Unlike C++ templates, generic Java code generates only one compiled version of a generic class. Generic Java classes can only use object types as type parameters -- primitive types are not allowed. Thus a List of type Integer, which uses a primitive wrapper class is legal, while a List of type int is not legal.
Part I of this book provides a thorough introduction to generics. Generics are a powerful, and sometimes controversial, new feature of the Java programming language. This part of the book describes generics, using the Collections Framework as a source of examples.
The first five chapters focus on the fundamentals of generics. Chapter 1 gives an overview of generics and other new features in Java 5, including boxing, foreach loops, and functions with a variable number of arguments. Chapter 2 reviews how subtyping works and explains how wildcards let you use subtyping in connection with generics. Chapter 3 describes how generics work with the Comparable interface, which requires a notion of bounds on type variables. Chapter 4 looks at how generics work with various declarations, including constructors, static members, and nested classes. Chapter 5 explains how to evolve legacy code to exploit generics, and how ease of evolution is a key advantage of the design of generics in Java. Once you have these five chapters under your belt, you will be able to use generics effectively in most basic situations.
The next four chapters treat advanced topics. Chapter 6 explains how the same design that leads to ease of evolution also necessarily leads to a few rough edges in the treatment of casts, exceptions, and arrays. The fit between generics and arrays is the worst rough corner of the language, so two principles are formulated to help work around the problems. Chapter 7 explains new features that relate generics and reflection, including the newly generified type "Class T" and additions to the Java library that support reflection of generic types. Chapter 8 contains advice on how to use generics effectively in practical coding. Checked collections, security issues, specialized classes, and binary compatibility are all considered. Chapter 9 presents five extended examples, looking at how generics affect five well-known design patterns: Visitor, Interpreter, Function, Strategy, and Subject-Observer. The following is a list of chapters in part one:
Chapter 1. Introduction
Chapter 2. Subtyping and Wildcards
Chapter 3. Comparison and Bounds
Chapter 4. Declarations
Chapter 5. Evolution, Not Revolution
Chapter 6. Reification
Chapter 7. Reflection
Chapter 8. Effective Generics
Chapter 9. Design Patterns
Part II is about the Java Collections Framework, which is a set of interfaces and classes in the packages java.util and java.util.concurrent. They provide client programs with various models of how to organize their objects, and various implementations of each model. These models are sometimes called abstract data types, and they are needed because different programs need different ways of organizing their objects. In one situation, you might want to organize your program's objects in a sequential list because their ordering is important and there are duplicates. In another, a set might be the right data type because now ordering is unimportant and you want to discard the duplicates. These two data types and others are represented by different interfaces in the Collections Framework, and there are examples of their use in chapter 10. However, none of these data types has a single "best" implementation--that is, one implementation that is better than all the others for all the operations. For example, a linked list may be better than an array implementation of lists for inserting and removing elements from the middle, but much worse for random access. So choosing the right implementation for a program involves knowing how it will be used as well as what is available.
This part of the book starts with an overview of the Framework and then looks in detail at each of the main interfaces and the standard implementations of them. Finally the book examines the special-purpose implementation and generic algorithms provided in the Collections class. The following is a list of chapters in part two:
Chapter 10. The Main Interfaces of the Java Collections Framework
Chapter 11. Preliminaries
Chapter 12. The Collection Interface
Chapter 13. Sets
Chapter 14. Queues
Chapter 15. Lists
Chapter 16. Maps
Chapter 17. The Collections Class
Overall, this is a very good book on the subject of Java generics, and I highly recommend it.Java Generics and Collections Overview
This comprehensive guide shows you how to master the most important changes to Java since it was first released.Generics and the greatly expanded collection libraries have tremendously increased the power of Java 5 and Java 6.But they have also confused many developers who haven't known how to take advantage of these new features.

Java Generics and Collections covers everything from the most basic uses of generics to the strangest corner cases.It teaches you everything you need to know about the collections libraries, so you'll always know which collection is appropriate for any given task, and how to use it.

Topics covered include:

Fundamentals of generics: type parameters and generic methods
Other new features: boxing and unboxing, foreach loops, varargs
Subtyping and wildcards
Evolution not revolution: generic libraries with legacy clients and generic clients with legacy libraries
Generics and reflection
Design patterns for generics
Sets, Queues, Lists, Maps, and their implementations
Concurrent programming and thread safety with collections
Performance implications of different collections

Generics and the new collection libraries they inspired take Java to a new level.If you want to take your software development practice to a new level, this book is essential reading.

Philip Wadler is Professor of Theoretical Computer Science at the University of Edinburgh, where his research focuses on the design of programming languages.He is a co-designer of GJ, work that became the basis for generics in Sun's Java 5.0.

Maurice Naftalin is Technical Director at Morningside Light Ltd., a software consultancy in the United Kingdom.He has most recently served as an architect and mentor at NSB Retail Systems plc, and as the leader of the client development team of a major UK government social service system.

"A brilliant exposition of generics. By far the best book on the topic, it provides a crystal clear tutorial that starts with the basics and ends leaving the reader with a deep understanding of both the use and design of generics." Gilad Bracha, Java Generics Lead, Sun Microsystems


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