Java Generics and Collections at Dominant Systems Book Store

"This is a very good book on two fairly focused topics - generics and collections. If you plan to make best use of either or both, buy a copy." - Ian Elliot, VSJ, April 2007

Customer Reviews & Comments
The 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.

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