Using lookup in Hash tables

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.

Any help will do..

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.

Thanks for the response Cindy.
This is actually a Java course, so I'm stuck on figuring out where to start, etc.

Well, maybe this will help. Animation of Hash Table

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.