Java Generics and Collections: Fundamentals and Recommended Practices

by Maurice Naftalin, Philip Wadler

Overview

Java Generics and Collections has been the go-to guide to generics for more than a decade. This second edition covers Java 21, providing a clear guide to generics from their most common uses to the strangest corner cases, giving you everything you need to know to use and write generic APIs effectively. It covers the collections library thoroughly, so you'll always know how and when to use each collection for any given task. And it explains stream processing, so you'll know which model to use and how they interoperate to get the best out of the platform library.

This indispensable guide covers:

• Fundamentals of generics: type parameters and generic methods
• Subtyping and wildcards
• Generics and reflection
• Design patterns for generics
• Sets, queues, lists, maps, and their implementations
• Concurrent programming and thread safety with collections
• Performance of different collection implementations
• Best practices for using and extending the Java collections framework
• Design philosophy and comparison with other collections libraries

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781098136727
Publisher:	O'Reilly Media, Incorporated
Publication date:	07/22/2025
Edition description:	2nd ed.
Pages:	368
Product dimensions:	6.90(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Maurice Naftalin is Technical Director at Morningside Light Ltd., a software consultancy in the United Kingdom.

Philip Wadler is Professor of Theoretical Computer Science at theUniversity of Edinburgh, where his research focuses on the design of programming languages. He is a co-designer of GJ, work that became the basis for generics in Sun's Java 5.0.