Java Generics and Collections

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By Maurice Naftalin, Philip Wadler

Publisher: O'Reilly Media

Released: October 2006

Pages: 286

This comprehensive guide shows you how to master the most importantchanges to Java since it was first released. Generics and the greatlyexpanded collection libraries have tremendously increased the power ofJava 5 and Java 6. But they have also confused many developers whohaven't known how to take advantage of these new features.

Java Generics and Collections covers everything from the mostbasic uses of generics to the strangest corner cases. It teaches youeverything you need to know about the collections libraries, so you'llalways know which collection is appropriate for any given task, andhow 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 andgeneric 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 anew level. If you want to take your software development practice toa new level, this book is essential reading.

Philip Wadler is Professor of Theoretical Computer Science at theUniversity of Edinburgh, where his research focuses on the design ofprogramming languages. He is a co-designer of GJ, work thatbecame 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 thetopic, it provides a crystal clear tutorial that starts with thebasics and ends leaving the reader with a deep understanding of boththe use and design of generics."
Gilad Bracha, Java Generics Lead, Sun Microsystems

Generics
1. Chapter 1 Introduction
  1. Generics
  2. Boxing and Unboxing
  3. Foreach
  4. Generic Methods and Varargs
  5. Assertions
2. Chapter 2 Subtyping and Wildcards
  1. Subtyping and the Substitution Principle
  2. Wildcards with extends
  3. Wildcards with super
  4. The Get and Put Principle
  5. Arrays
  6. Wildcards Versus Type Parameters
  7. Wildcard Capture
  8. Restrictions on Wildcards
3. Chapter 3 Comparison and Bounds
  1. Comparable
  2. Maximum of a Collection
  3. A Fruity Example
  4. Comparator
  5. Enumerated Types
  6. Multiple Bounds
  7. Bridges
  8. Covariant Overriding
4. Chapter 4 Declarations
  1. Constructors
  2. Static Members
  3. Nested Classes
  4. How Erasure Works
5. Chapter 5 Evolution, Not Revolution
  1. Legacy Library with Legacy Client
  2. Generic Library with Generic Client
  3. Generic Library with Legacy Client
  4. Legacy Library with Generic Client
  5. Conclusions
6. Chapter 6 Reification
  1. Reifiable Types
  2. Instance Tests and Casts
  3. Exception Handling
  4. Array Creation
  5. The Principle of Truth in Advertising
  6. The Principle of Indecent Exposure
  7. How to Define ArrayList
  8. Array Creation and Varargs
  9. Arrays as a Deprecated Type?
  10. Summing Up
7. Chapter 7 Reflection
  1. Generics for Reflection
  2. Reflected Types are Reifiable Types
  3. Reflection for Primitive Types
  4. A Generic Reflection Library
  5. Reflection for Generics
  6. Reflecting Generic Types
8. Chapter 8 Effective Generics
  1. Take Care when Calling Legacy Code
  2. Use Checked Collections to Enforce Security
  3. Specialize to Create Reifiable Types
  4. Maintain Binary Compatibility
9. Chapter 9 Design Patterns
  1. Visitor
  2. Interpreter
  3. Function
  4. Strategy
  5. Subject-Observer
Collections
1. Chapter 10 The Main Interfaces of the Java Collections Framework
2. Chapter 11 Preliminaries
  1. Iterable and Iterators
  2. Implementations
  3. Efficiency and the O-Notation
  4. Contracts
  5. Collections and Thread Safety
3. Chapter 12 The Collection Interface
  1. Using the Methods of Collection
  2. Implementing Collection
  3. Collection Constructors
4. Chapter 13 Sets
  1. Implementing Set
  2. SortedSet and NavigableSet
  3. Comparing Set Implementations
5. Chapter 14 Queues
  1. Using the Methods of Queue
  2. Implementing Queue
  3. BlockingQueue
  4. Deque
  5. Comparing Queue Implementations
6. Chapter 15 Lists
  1. Using the Methods of List
  2. Implementing List
  3. Comparing List Implementations
7. Chapter 16 Maps
  1. Using the Methods of Map
  2. Implementing Map
  3. SortedMap and NavigableMap
  4. ConcurrentMap
  5. ConcurrentNavigableMap
  6. Comparing Map Implementations
8. Chapter 17 The Collections Class
  1. Generic Algorithms
  2. Collection Factories
  3. Wrappers
  4. Other Methods

Colophon

Title:

Java Generics and Collections

By:

Maurice Naftalin, Philip Wadler

Publisher:

O'Reilly Media

Formats:

Print
Ebook
Safari Books Online

Print:

October 2006

Ebook:

February 2009

Pages:

286

Print ISBN:

978-0-596-52775-4

| ISBN 10:

0-596-52775-6

Ebook ISBN:

978-0-596-10265-4

| ISBN 10:

0-596-10265-8

Colophon

About the AuthorsMaurice 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 U.K. government social service system. He has taught Java since 1998 at both basic and advanced levels for Learning Tree and Sun Educational Services.

Philip Wadler is professor of theoretical computer science at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, where his research focuses on functional and logic programming. He co-authored the Generic Java standard that became the basis for generics in Sun's Java 5.0, and he also contributed to the XQuery language standard base. He received his Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie-Mellon University and co-wrote Introduction to Functional Programming (Prentice-Hall).

ColophonThe animal on the cover of Java Generics and Collections is an alligator. Alligators are found only in southern parts of the U.S. and in China. They are rare in China, native only to the Yangtze River Basin. Alligators generally cannot tolerate salt water and therefore live in freshwater ponds, swamps, and the like.

When first born, alligators are tiny, measuring only about six inches. However, it grow extremely fast in the first years of life-a foot each year. A fully grown female is usually around 9 feet and between 150 and 200 pounds, while an adult male typically reaches 11 feet and weighs about 350 to 400 pounds. The largest known alligator on record, found in Louisiana in the early 1900s, was 19 feet, 2 inches. A key identifying characteristic of an alligator's appearance is its short, broad snout. An adult alligator's skin is a gray-black color, which turns dark black when wet, and it has a white underbelly. Young alligators have yellow and white stripes across their backs. The shape of the snout and skin color provide physical characteristics that differentiate alligators from crocodiles, which have long, thin snouts and are a tan color.

Alligators are mainly nocturnal and do most of their hunting and feeding after the sun sets. They are carnivores and eat a large variety of food, such as turtles, fish, frogs, birds, snakes, small mammals, and even smaller alligators. However, once an alligator grows into adulthood, it really faces no threats-other than humans.

The cover image is a 19th-century engraving from the Dover Pictorial Archive. The cover font is Adobe ITC Garamond. The text font is Linotype Birka; the heading font is Adobe Myriad Condensed; and the code font is LucasFont's TheSans Mono Condensed.

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oreilly Java Generics and Collections

4.8

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Displaying reviews 1-4

10/31/2010

5.0

Superb

By Wendell Murray

from Southeastern Pennsylvania

About Me Designer, Developer

Pros

Accurate
Concise
Easy to understand
Helpful examples
Well-written

Cons

Best Uses

Expert
Intermediate

Comments about oreilly Java Generics and Collections:

The O'Reilly series of books on Java and Java-related topics is outstanding. This is one more outstanding book in that series. This book is well-organized, the material is well-presented and all details - many of which I beforehand was only vaguely or not all aware of - are included.

Noteworthy among various other features is the explanation of terms such as "contract" which, as the authors note, is rarely defined but widely used in texts on Java. The authors note on page 157 (Chapter 11, section 4 Contracts) "you are likely to come across the term contract, often without any accompanying explanation". True enough, so the authors proceed to give a clear explanation of what "contract" means in regard to software.

This is typical of the excellent exposition of some complicated details in the functioning of generics and of the Collections framework in general.

8/12/2007

(2 of 2 customers found this review helpful)

5.0

Finally, A Book Devoted To Generics And Collections

By Dave Walz-Burkett

from Undisclosed

Comments about oreilly Java Generics and Collections:

Ever since the release of Java 5, I've been keeping my eyes open for a book that describes what I believe to be the most powerful new feature of Java - generics. The new book published by O'Reilly, Java Generics and Collections covers the topic in spades. As a bonus, the second half of this book examines the Java Collections Framework. Since the Collections Framework was rewritten to incorporate the use of generics, it makes perfect sense for the authors to spend a reasonable amount of time describing the new interfaces.

A brief introduction highlights the use of generics, autoboxing, foreach loops, generic methods and varargs. The examples are written using the Collections Framework. Subtyping and the use of wildcards follow the introduction and begin to show the real power of generics.

Getting past the basics, a chapter devoted to the Comparable and Comparator interfaces describes some very useful concepts, such as how to use the Comparable interface to find the minimum or maximum element in a collection. The use of enumerated types is briefly covered here, as well as the concepts of multiple bounds, bridges and covariant overriding.

A chapter describing how to declare a generic class helps you build your own classes. Following that is a useful chapter that describes how the design of generics is evolutionary, not revolutionary. It details how generics in Java 5 allow you to gradually migrate your legacy code, rather than replace it all at once.

If you use generic types in casts, instance testing, exceptions or arrays, a chapter on reification warns you of rough edges and limitations you may find and describes some workarounds. How generics changes reflection is also covered.

The last two chapters of the first half of the book describe how to use generics effectively in your code and provide samples of how implementations of select design patterns can take advantage of generics.

The second half of the book, which dives into the Collections Framework, starts with a quick chapter called 'Preliminaries' that spends time discussing underlying concepts, such as the Iterable interface. Thread safety issues are covered in this chapter as well. Thread-safe concurrent collections were introduced in Java 5 and their use, as compared with synchronized collections is also discussed.

The Collection interface is given its own chapter, which is important considering that it defines functionality common to any type of collection other than maps. Following are chapters describing sets, queues and lists. The Map interface also warrants its own chapter, in which the available methods and the various map implementations are discussed. The comparative performance of different set, queue, list and map implementations is shown in tables at the end of each chapter.

Following the Collection and Map interface chapters is the final chapter which describes the Collections class in detail. The Collections class contains static methods that operate on collections or return them.

I found the code and diagrams in this book very easy to understand and a great resource when trying to decide which collection or map implementation to use for a specific problem.

Once you learn how to take advantage of generics, you'll begin to write more useful, reusable code. This book now occupies a space on my shelf next to my Algorithms and Data Structures books.

2/16/2007

(0 of 2 customers found this review helpful)

5.0

Egyptian JUG Review

By Ahmed Hashim

from Undisclosed

Comments about oreilly Java Generics and Collections:

Reviewd By Islam Mahgoub (http://www.egjug.org/user/771)

In the past, I wondered a lot about Java Generics, and how

could I use it, how it's implemented in Java, what goes behind the scenes, How

could I evolve my code to use Java Generics, what about the differences between

Java Generics and C++ templates, what does the phrase "Java generics are

defined by erasure" mean, and a lot of other questions concerning Java recently

added features to support generics.

This book was recommended to me by a friend, really it's a

great recommendation, I have found answers to the most of my questions concerning

Java Generics and Collection framework.

At the end, I think this book is suitable for both, a Java

developer who know nothing about Java Generics and Collection and wants to

start his journey with Java Generics and Collection framework, and also a Java

expert who already has a good knowledge about Java Generics and Collection

framework, but wants a more deep understanding of this topic, and wants to know

how to use this feature in a professional way, and what goes behind the scenes.

Read the complete review. (At the end, I think this book is suitable for both, a Java

developer who know nothing about Java Generics and Collection and wants to

start his journey with Java Generics and Collection framework, and also a Java

expert who already has a good knowledge about Java Generics and Collection

framework, but wants a more deep understanding of this topic, and wants to know

how to use this feature in a professional way, and what goes behind the scenes.

)

2/1/2007

(0 of 1 customers found this review helpful)

4.0

Greenvile Java Users Group - Moderator

By John Yeary

from Undisclosed

Comments about oreilly Java Generics and Collections:

The Java Generics book provides an in-depth analysis of the new Generics and Collections APIs in Java 5 and 6. The book provides a level of detail on this new technology that can not be found elsewhere. This book is generally not for a novice programmer due to the level of architectural details and theory. It provides a seasoned programmer with a comprehensive examination of why and how the Generics and Collections APIs were modified, as well as, the design decisions and impact. The book provides the programmer with the information they need to make informed decisions on which type of Collection to use, and the associated pitfalls based on design decisions.

The only issue I found with the book was that it did not provide enough concrete examples. The code was provided generally in code snippets which do not provide enough detail.

The book is a definite choice for the advanced Java programmer and architect. If you are serious about learning these new technologies: this is the book to get.

Displaying reviews 1-4