Trees
Trees are a way to organize data that can give more information than a simple list. Trees are made of nodes, with one root node. Each node has pointers to the next node down the tree (or NULL if the node is at the lowest level). If tree data is sorted, such as in a Binary Search Tree, operations like searching can become much more efficient. This section goes over the basics of trees and briefly introduces Binary Search Trees.
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Lecture
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Short
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Supplementary Resources
- Princeton on Binary Search Trees
- Anna Brown on The Secret Life of Trees
- Vaidehi Joshi on How To Not Be Stumped By Trees
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Thought Questions
- What real world situations are best described in a tree?
- What makes binary search trees so powerful?
- How else could we sort the data in a tree?