I am taking my first course in Java, and I am way off base.
I'm trying out exercises from The Practice of Programming book. I'm working on this exercise:
Change lookup so that if the average list length becomes more than x, the array is grown automatically by a factor of y and the hash table is rebuilt.
It sounds like you're coding your own hashtable there, instead of using Java's Hashtable class. I bet a C programming language newsgroup would be a good place for a question like that, if you don't find people that 'roll their own' hashtable here.
It shows you in a Java applet, how a hash table works. Click the 'Execute' button, then the 'Run' button, to see it insert numbers into a hashtable one by one, while simultaneously showing the code it's executing.
It offers several different hash algorithms to watch.
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