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

Generics and the new collection libraries they inspired take Java to a new level. If you want to take your software development practice to a new level, this book is essential reading.

• Preface
• Generics
  • Introduction
  • Subtyping and Wildcards
  • Comparison and Bounds
  • Declarations
  • Evolution, Not Revolution
  • Reification
  • Reflection
  • Effective Generics
  • Design Patterns
• Collections
  • The Main Interfaces of the Java Collections Framework
  • Preliminaries
  • The Collection Interface
  • Sets
  • Queues
  • Lists
  • Maps
  • The Collections Class
• Index