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 Minimum and Maximum Key Values

• Deleting a Node

• The Efficiency of Binary Search Trees

• Trees Represented as Arrays

• Printing Trees

• Duplicate Keys

• The BinarySearchTreeTester.py 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 you’ve seen so far cannot. In this chapter you learn why you would want to use trees, how they work, and how ...

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