The earlier variants of the RecyclerView were the ListView and the GridView. Luckily they are a little simpler (less abstract): http://www.grokkingandroid.com/first-glance-androids-recyclerview/.
The ListView is used to display a linear list of items while the GridView is used to display a grid (matrix) of them: http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/ui/layout/gridview.html.
An example of this implemented in our test application is: https://github.com/larkintuckerllc/HelloAndroid/commit/3e8d4b50879fc0102ee67728cb77abb4c30c3b9a
