Thread: question from the Core Java II book

The point of a hash table is to make looking for objects faster because they are put into buckets. I think i have a decent analogy that may help.

Imagine you have a huge bin of baseball/football/hockey/basketball cards. If i wanted to find a Yankees card i would have to go through the whole lot till i found it, but if i put them into a "hashtable" it would be faster. Imagine my hash function divides the cards by sport. So i would have 4 buckets one for each sport. Then if i wanted to find a Yankees card i would instantly know what bucket to look in. This cuts down on search time greatly.

Back to your example. You are able to set the initial size of a HashTable. In your example they chose 101 buckets. If i want to input a value with a hashcode of 345, it would go in bucket 42 as they said. If i added a value with a hashcode of 446/244/143 they would also go in that bucket. So later, if i came back with my 345 hash code object i would know to go to bucket 42 then progress with a linear search to find my particular object.

Obviously the highest performance would be to have a hashtable that has one bucket per possible hash value, but that could take up a lot of space. So it is a tradeoff of performance vs space. Side-note, all of this is done in the background. All the coder cares about typically is their keys and values. Unless this hashtable is a bottleneck, people dont typically mess with the number of buckets or how full buckets can get (initial capacity and load factor as java calls them).

God i hope that all made sense.

Side note, in case you were wondering. What's the difference between hashtable and hashmap? Hashtable is synchronous and hashmap is not. Hashtable does not allow null keys or values, hashmap allows null values and one null key.

Hash table is an idea of a data structure. HashTable and HashMap as they are known in java are both hash tables. You can pass in an initial capacity and load factor into both of them. The only differences between the two i mentioned at the end of my previous post. If you need null values or do not need it to be synchronous then use HashMap. If you need it to be synchronous use a HashTable. Remember, things being synchronous comes with overhead. If you dont need it, dont use it.