Hello, and welcome back.

I'm Craig and I'm a developer.

If you haven't taken the courses listed in the pre-requisites,

I highly recommend that you do so.

We are gonna build on the learnings that you have gathered during those courses.

Now, the good news is, you don't need any other programming experience or knowledge.

I'd like to take a minute to point out something that not every student has

realized, so I thought I'd point it out before we got started.

Now depending on where you're watching this video,

you might be able to control the speed of the video.

Take a second and look at your controls, and please, feel free to slow me down or

speed me up.

I won't take any offense at all, I promise.

This course is going to deal with different approaches of storing,

accessing, and bending data to your will.

Now by definition, a data structure is a particular way of organizing data so

that it can be used efficiently.

In practice, what that means is that there are some tried and true ways of using and

exposing data in your code so that it can be retrieved and processed quickly by

the computer, as well as be easily understood by users of your code.

I'm very excited to share this knowledge with you,

as it's going to take your coding to new heights, but

before we get there, I'd like to introduce some complimentary concepts to you.

They'll help with your understanding of how these things work with a dab of why

they work the way they do.

Now Java has evolved over time, and naturally so has its best practices.

As you might imagine, out in the wild, what you'll find is that not everything

has had the chance to get migrated to newer and fresher ways of doing things.

Therefore learning how concepts and

techniques have progressed will greatly benefit you as a Java developer.

In this course, I will do my best at walking you through the history of

working with data and Java, and its current best practices.

I want you to be able to recognize these patterns when you encounter them.

I believe that this approach will give you the respect for

the evolution of the language as well as a deeper understanding of why

things are implemented the way they are.

Now in an effort to keep things dynamic,

I sent out a request to the interwebs to send me Tweets so

that we could use the data and explore the common data structures.

Now after we get a handle on those data structures,

we'll build a console application that will be a karaoke machine.

It will allow us to store and

list all available songs, as well as group them by artist and song title.

We'll also provide a way to create an on deck queue so

that we can see what songs are coming up next.

So, we've got a lot to learn.

What are we waiting for?

Let's get started.