The Composite Design Pattern is an object-oriented representation of a recursive data structure.
This course focuses on introducing the language, libraries, tools and concepts of Java®. The course is specifically targeted at students who intend to take 6.170 in the following term and feel they would struggle because they lack the necessary background. Topics include: Object-oriented programming, primitives, arrays, objects, inheritance, interfaces, polymorphism, hashing, data structures, collections, nested classes, floating point precision, defensive programming, and depth first search algorithm.
In programming, it is often necessary to have objects with which one can store data, retrieve data when needed, and remove data when no longer needed. Such objects are instances of what we call container classes. There are basically two schemes for organizing the objects for storage: a linear scheme and a non-linear scheme. This leads to the notion of container structures. The linear container structure is called a list. The non-linear structure can be sub-classified into many sub-types such as the various tree structures and hash tables, which we will study in subsequent modules.
This module focuses on the defining the list structure and designing its implementation.
