So far in this book, you have written programs which work with few variables. For example, consider a program which stores the details of a student and prints it out. You would create a class to represent the student. Each instance of this class stores the details of a student, therefore, you would create a variable which references a student object. What if there were four students? You would create four variables which reference four student objects. What if there were a hundred students, or even thousand? In such cases creating hundreds of variables is absurd.
A better solution would be to use a list which keeps track of the students. Java provides a fundamental type known as an array which is similar to lists. In this chapter you will learn about arrays, their declaration and initialization. Finally, we will learn a variation of arrays known as multdimensional arrays.
Interestingly, Java actually includes classes which implement the full fledged behavior of lists. However, these lists are not fundamental objects like arrays, that is, they are not treated specially by Java. Further, some of these lists internally store the values using arrays.