7
Trees
When we look around, a lot of the data we work with is hierarchical, with a clear relationship between a parent and child. Common examples include family trees, organizational charts, flow charts/diagrams, and more. Figure 7-1 is a famous example popularized by xkcd (https://xkcd.com/518/).
FIGURE 7-1
Visualizing the quirkiness of our programming lives nicely!
While we can certainly represent hierarchical data using linear data structures like arrays or linked lists, just as it is certainly possible to eat soup using a plate and fork, it isn’t optimal. There are better ways. One of the better ways is the tree data structure.
In the ...
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