Android™ How to Program, Second Edition

J.2. Collections Overview

Section E.12 introducted the generic ArrayList collection—a resizable array-like data structure that stores references to objects of a type that you specify when you create the ArrayList. We now continue our discussion of the Java collections framework, which contains many other prebuilt generic data structures and various methods for manipulating them. We focus on those that are used in the Android chapters of this book and those that have close parallels in the Android APIs. For complete details of the collections framework, visit

docs.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/technotes/guides/collections/

A collection is a data structure—actually, an object—that can hold references to other objects. Usually, collections contain ...