CS 271: Trees Module: Introduction To Binary Trees

Module content developed by Professor Tralie. Module engine developed by Professor Tralie and Professor Mongan.

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Below is a video from CS 174. The first 7 minutes go over the concept of binary trees, and the rest shows how to implement them in C++. Do take a moment to review the C++ implementation; we will talk about some C++ code for trees in class, because they will give us a great opportunity to practice recursion and memory management in synergy.

Notes

• A binary tree is a generalization where every node has both a left and a right reference to other nodes, known as the left and right child nodes, respectively.
• Binary trees are drawn from top to bottom by convention. The top node where a binary tree starts is called the root node
• If a node c is the child of a node p, then p is referred to as c's parent.
• Binary trees are naturally recursive data structure, as an entire subtree can be spliced in by making the left child of a node be the root of that subtree.