Practical C Programming

How it works...

A heap is a complete binary tree that can be either a max-heap or a min-heap. The max-heap has the property that the key value of any node must be greater than or equal to the key values of its children. In the min-heap, the key value of any node must be lower than or equal to the values of its children.

In this recipe, we will learn to create a max-heap of the following list of integers:

5

2

9

3

1

4

6

In this heap sort method, the binary tree is constructed in the form of an array. In heap sort, the values in the array are added one by one, keeping the max-heap property true (that is, the key value of any node should be larger than or equal to its children). While adding the elements of the array, we keep track of ...