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