Intermediate collections roundup
Before you move on to the summary and the next chapter, let's drive home some key points from what we've just learned. Topics that don't always have a 1-to-1 relationship with the actual game prototype we're building need a little extra love sometimes.
The one question I'm sure you're asking yourself at this point is: why use any of these other collection types when I could just use lists for everything? And that's a perfectly valid question. The easy answer is that stacks, queues, and HashSets offer better performance than lists when applied in the correct circumstances. For example, when you need to store items in a specific order, and access them in a specific order, a stack would be more efficient than a list.
The more complicated answer is that using different collection types enforces how your code is allowed to interact with them and their elements. This is a mark of good code design, as it removes...