Javanotes 9, Chapter 7 -- Arrays, ArrayLists, and Records

Chapter 7

Arrays, ArrayLists, and Records

Computers get a lot of their power from working with data structures. A data structure is an organized collection of related data. An object is a data structure, combined usually with some methods, but this type of data structure—consisting of a fairly small number of named instance variables—is just the beginning. In many cases, programmers build complicated data structures by hand, by linking objects together. We'll look at these custom-built data structures in Chapter 9. This chapter looks at more basic data structures. There is one type of data structure that is so important and so basic that it is built into every programming language: the array.

You have already encountered arrays in Section 3.8 and Subsection 5.1.4. We continue the study of arrays in this chapter, including some new details of their use and some additional array-processing techniques. In particular, we will look at the important topic of algorithms for searching and sorting an array in Section 7.5.

An array has a fixed size that can't be changed after the array is created. But in many cases, it is useful to have a data structure that can grow and shrink as necessary. In Section 7.3, we will look at a standard class, ArrayList, that represents such a data structure.

An array is a numbered sequence of items, all of the same type. A record is another kind of standard data structure. Like an array, a record consists of a sequence of items, but in a record, the items are referred to by name instead of by number, and the items can be of different types. Any object in Java can be thought of as a record in this sense, but Java 17 introduced records explicitly into the language as a special kind of class with certain restrictions. We will look at record classes in Section 7.4.

Chapter 7

Arrays, ArrayLists, and Records

Contents of Chapter 7: