NIO buffer types

There are actually various different buffer classes in the java.nio package which we'll look at on the next few pages:

ByteBuffer is the most basic and commonly used (and actually exists in a couple of subclasses we'll see later). It is optimised for writing single bytes or groups of bytes, but can read and write any Java primitive type.
For each Java primitive type (short, int, double etc), there exists a corresponding buffer type: ShortBuffer, IntBuffer, DoubleBuffer etc. These are optimised for bulk operations on the given primitive type. So for example, a FloatBuffer can get/put a float array. See: reading and writing non-byte arrays for more details.
The CharBuffer has some additional special properties: it can be accessed as a CharSequence and allows regular expressions to be run against it.