🗄️ Data Structures

A data structure is simply a way of organizing data in memory so that it can be accessed and modified efficiently. So far, working with individual variables has been enough, but real programs usually need to work with collections of data: every motor's CAN ID on a mechanism, every waypoint in an autonomous path, every team scouted at competition.

Java provides many different ways to store a collection, and each one makes different trade-offs between speed, memory, and how the data is organized. Picking the right data structure for the job is one of the most important skills in writing efficient, readable code, using the wrong one can turn a simple operation into a slow or error-prone mess.

This section covers Java's core data structures, starting with the fixed-size array, moving through resizable and linked lists, restricted-access stacks and queues, and finishing with key-based lookups using HashMap and HashSet, along with the tools Java provides for iterating through all of them.