The Reader/Writer class hierarchy is character-oriented, and the InputStream/OutputStream class hierarchy is byte-oriented. The ByteStream classes are used to perform input-output of 8-bit bytes whereas the CharacterStream classes are used to perform the input/output for the 16-bit Unicode system. There are many classes in the ByteStream class hierarchy, but the most frequently used classes are FileInputStream and FileOutputStream. The most frequently used classes CharacterStream class hierarchy is FileReader and FileWriter.
