I always wanted to implement the logic behind the famous data structure of Java , HashMap and here it comes. Though it’s not the complete implementation considering all optimization scenarios, but it will highlight the basic algorithm behind the HashMap . So let’s start, this implementation will use my LinkedList implementation (Reason: for this implementation I thought to write everything from the scratch apart from primitive data types. Sounds weird? May be ;-) ). You may refer my earlier post on LinkedList , as I’m going to use it. HashMap is a key-value pair data structure, where you retrieve value by passing key. To optimize the search of key, a concept of Bucket (an Array of Java Objects) has been introduced. This is used, so that if search hits this Bucket , corresponding value element is instantly retrieved, otherwise it iterates sequentially through the Linked List associated with each Bucket element. So you can say if all HashMap elements get fit into the Bucket, retrieving