Book Image

Oracle Certified Associate, Java SE 7 Programmer Study Guide

By : Richard M. Reese
Book Image

Oracle Certified Associate, Java SE 7 Programmer Study Guide

By: Richard M. Reese

Overview of this book

<p>Java SE 7 Associate Programmer certification adds to your qualification as a Java developer. Knowledge of Java is important, but knowing how to write an efficient and productive code adds to your skills and gives you an edge when you are planning to give the certification exam. Coverage of the objectives goes beyond a simple review of certification objectives.</p> <p>"Oracle Certified Associate, Java SE 7 Programmer Study Guide" addresses certification exam objectives and provides discussion and examples to show the best ways of applying Java language features in real world programming. You will gain in-depth understanding of Java by examining how objects are allocated in the heap and how methods are managed in the program stack.<br /><br />"Oracle Certified Associate, Java SE 7 Programmer Study Guide" covers all of the Java SE 7 Associate Programmer certification objectives. It starts with a high level overview of an application’s structure to provide a framework for subsequent chapters. Chapters are organized around common themes with emphasis on memory usage. You will get an in-depth and complete understanding of the run-time Java environment using the illustrations that show the impact of class and method usage on the program stack and heap. <br /><br />Augmenting the coverage of certification objectives are examples of how you can use the classes, methods, and techniques in a productive and sound manner. In addition, sample exam questions are given in each chapter.</p>
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Oracle Certified Associate, Java SE 7 Programmer Study Guide
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Collections


The Collections Framework was introduced in Java 2 as a set of interfaces and classes that are superior to many of the interfaces and classes found in the earlier java.util package such as Vector, Stack, and HashTable. These interfaces and classes should always be used instead of the older ones whenever possible. Many of the Collection Framework interfaces and classes are summarized in the following table:

Interface

Class

Set

HashSet

TreeSet

List

ArrayList

LinkedList

Map

HashMap

TreeMap

The Collection Framework is covered in more detail at http://java.sun.com/developer/onlineTraining/collections/Collection.html. Here, we will address the ArrayList class as it is a certification topic. It is recommended that the ArrayList class be used when a List is needed. As we will see, iterators are used with the ArrayList to support traversal of the list. We will start our discussion with coverage of this topic.

Iterators

Iterators provide a means of traversing a set of...