8. Binary Trees

In This Chapter

• Why Use Binary Trees?

• Tree Terminology

• An Analogy

• How Do Binary Search Trees Work?

• Finding a Node

• Inserting a Node

• Traversing the Tree

• Finding Maximum and Minimum Values

• Deleting a Node

• The Efficiency of Binary Trees

• Trees Represented as Arrays

• Duplicate Keys

• The Complete tree.java Program

• The Huffman Code

In this chapter we switch from algorithms, the focus of Chapter 7, “Advanced Sorting,” to data structures. Binary trees are one of the fundamental data storage structures used in programming. They provide advantages that the data structures we’ve seen so far cannot. In this chapter we’ll learn why you would want to use trees, how they work, and how to go about creating them.

Why ...

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