This book takes a gentle approach to the data structures course in Java. It offers an early, self-contained review of object-oriented programming and Java to give students a firm grasp of key concepts, and allows those experienced in other languages to adjust easily. The book also offers a flexibility which allows professors such options as emphasizing object-oriented programming, covering recursion and sorting early or accelerating the pace of the course. This title meets the needs of professors searching for a book to balance the introduction of object-oriented programming and data structures with Java. The new edition has been updated to cover Java 1.3 and includes new appendices with more reference material on such topics as Java collections. It also features increased coverage of object-oriented programming and inheritance. New exercises on radix sort and shell sort have also been added.