Chapter 14. Using Collections
Programmers seldom want to reinvent the wheel by coding custom implementations of standard data structures such as linked lists, hash tables, binary trees, and so on. They would rather concentrate on the application logic that uses these data structures. Fortunately, the makers of Java and C# address this problem by integrating the formal implementations of popular data structures into the API. Java's java.util package has a cornucopia of classes that are extremely useful for writing complex applications. C#'s System.Collections namespace has a similar arsenal of classes that can make life easy for the programmer.
This chapter introduces the classes in C#'s System.Collections namespace. We briefly outline most of the classes, giving examples and comparing the classes to their Java counterparts. This chapter assumes that you are familiar with the concept of data structures and have dabbled in Java's java.util package.
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