What's the difference between List and Content Type in SharePoint?

Question

What's the difference between List and Content Type in SharePoint?

For me, it is almost the same.

I see Content type as a special kind of List ?

Is it OK to see it like that ?

What else are the differences?

BTW, I am a beginner to SharePoint.

Answer 1

No, that view is false. A very good analogy to understand the differences, providing you know C# or any other modern language:

• A list is like a class;
• A content type is like an interface.

Lists physically exist and contain physical data in a database, so they are like a table in SQL (please note the actual data structures at the SQL level are completely different, but you definitely don't have to care about this). On the other hand, content types are just definitions, sets of fields, that are applied to lists.

The result is that lists can contain items of various content types. In fact, lists contain heterogenous data. A list item is composed of a union of all fields that are referred to from content types applied to that particular list—hence the class/interface analogy.

Answer 2

If I might add: You create content type for certain data type, and your content type contains set of metadata (or fields) that define your data type. One list can have several content types attached to itself, and vice versa, one content type can be used by several lists.
When do you create content type? Well, every time you need to manipulate certain data in more than one list/library, it's recommended to create your own content type for that data, so that you don't need to create list fields "by hand" every time. Instead, you only reference your content type.