Book Image

The Java Workshop

By : David Cuartielles, Andreas Göransson, Eric Foster-Johnson
Book Image

The Java Workshop

By: David Cuartielles, Andreas Göransson, Eric Foster-Johnson

Overview of this book

Java is a versatile, popular programming language used across a wide range of industries. Learning how to write effective Java code can take your career to the next level, and The Java Workshop will help you do just that. This book is designed to take the pain out of Java coding and teach you everything you need to know to be productive in building real-world software. The Workshop starts by showing you how to use classes, methods, and the built-in Collections API to manipulate data structures effortlessly. You’ll dive right into learning about object-oriented programming by creating classes and interfaces and making use of inheritance and polymorphism. After learning how to handle exceptions, you’ll study the modules, packages, and libraries that help you organize your code. As you progress, you’ll discover how to connect to external databases and web servers, work with regular expressions, and write unit tests to validate your code. You’ll also be introduced to functional programming and see how to implement it using lambda functions. By the end of this Workshop, you’ll be well-versed with key Java concepts and have the knowledge and confidence to tackle your own ambitious projects with Java.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)

Introduction

Java comes with a built-in Collections API, allowing you to manipulate data structures with very little effort. A collection is an object that contains multiple elements. Collections are used to store, share, process, and communicate aggregated data. We call this system the Java collections framework.

As part of this framework, there are different components that are used to optimize our interaction with the actual data:

  • Interfaces: Abstract data types that represent collections
  • Implementations: Specific implementations of the collection interfaces
  • Algorithms: Polymorphic methods used to process the data within a collection for operations such as sorting and searching

    Note

    Other programming languages have their own collection frameworks. For example, C++ has the Standard Template Library (STL). Java boasts simplicity when it comes to its collection framework.

Using the collections framework has many benefits, including a reduction in the complexity...