12.1. Binary Trees Chapter Introduction¶

Tree structures enable efficient access and efficient update to large collections of data. Binary trees in particular are widely used and relatively easy to implement. But binary trees are useful for many things besides searching. Just a few examples of applications that trees can speed up include prioritizing jobs, describing mathematical expressions and the syntactic elements of computer programs, or organizing the information needed to drive data compression algorithms.

This chapter covers terminology used for discussing binary trees, tree traversals, approaches to implementing tree nodes, and various examples of binary trees.