维基百科上有很好的章节介绍了它们的区别。

Linked lists have several advantages over arrays. Elements can be inserted into linked lists indefinitely, while an array will eventually either fill up or need to be resized, an expensive operation that may not even be possible if memory is fragmented. Similarly, an array from which many elements are removed may become wastefully empty or need to be made smaller. On the other hand, arrays allow random access, while linked lists allow only sequential access to elements. Singly-linked lists, in fact, can only be traversed in one direction. This makes linked lists unsuitable for applications where it's useful to look up an element by its index quickly, such as heapsort. Sequential access on arrays is also faster than on linked lists on many machines due to locality of reference and data caches. Linked lists receive almost no benefit from the cache. Another disadvantage of linked lists is the extra storage needed for references, which often makes them impractical for lists of small data items such as characters or boolean values. It can also be slow, and with a naïve allocator, wasteful, to allocate memory separately for each new element, a problem generally solved using memory pools.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linked_list

当集合不断增加和减少时，链表尤其有用。例如，很难想象尝试使用数组实现一个Queue(添加到末尾，从前面删除)—您将花费所有时间向下移动内容。另一方面，对于链表来说，这是微不足道的。

根据你的语言，可以考虑以下一些缺点和优点:

C编程语言:当使用链表(通常是通过结构指针)时，必须特别注意不要泄漏内存。正如前面提到的，链表很容易洗牌，因为我们所做的只是改变指针，但是我们会记得释放所有的东西吗?

Java: Java具有自动垃圾收集功能，因此内存泄漏不会成为问题，但是对于高级程序员来说，隐藏了链表的实现细节。从列表中间删除节点等方法的过程比该语言的一些用户所期望的要复杂得多。

使用链接列表的人必须阅读。人们会再次爱上数组的。 它谈到了 无序执行，硬件预取，内存延迟等。

http://www.futurechips.org/thoughts-for-researchers/quick-post-linked-lists.html

A widely unappreciated argument for ArrayList and against LinkedList is that LinkedLists are uncomfortable while debugging. The time spent by maintenance developers to understand the program, e.g. to find bugs, increases and IMHO does sometimes not justify the nanoseconds in performance improvements or bytes in memory consumption in enterprise applicatons. Sometimes (well, of course it depends on the type of applications), it's better to waste a few bytes but have an application which is more maintainable or easier to understand.

例如，在Java环境中，使用Eclipse调试器，调试ArrayList将显示一个非常容易理解的结构:

arrayList   ArrayList<String>
  elementData   Object[]
    [0] Object  "Foo"
    [1] Object  "Foo"
    [2] Object  "Foo"
    [3] Object  "Foo"
    [4] Object  "Foo"
    ...

另一方面，查看LinkedList的内容并找到特定的对象变成了一个展开树的噩梦，更不用说过滤LinkedList内部信息所需的认知开销:

linkedList  LinkedList<String>
    header  LinkedList$Entry<E>
        element E
        next    LinkedList$Entry<E>
            element E   "Foo"
            next    LinkedList$Entry<E>
                element E   "Foo"
                next    LinkedList$Entry<E>
                    element E   "Foo"
                    next    LinkedList$Entry<E>
                    previous    LinkedList$Entry<E>
                    ...
                previous    LinkedList$Entry<E>
            previous    LinkedList$Entry<E>
        previous    LinkedList$Entry<E>

这实际上是一个效率问题，在链表中插入、删除或移动(而不是简单地交换)元素的开销是最小的，即操作本身是O(1)，而不是O(n)。如果您大量操作数据列表，这可能会产生显著的差异。您可以根据对数据类型的操作方式选择数据类型，并为所使用的算法选择最有效的数据类型。