To normal people outside of the world of CS, this word might seem completely harmless. Might even give them happy thoughts, trees..greenery .. who doesn't like that, right ? right ?
Wrong.
Because to programmers, it is like a mini nightmare in one word.
But no, don't be afraid because it's not all bad... at least not yet.
Let me tell you why...
So, like I explained in my previous post, recursion is a simple concept to understand and trace but not that easy to code. There's is a general idea to follow but unless you understand exactly how to you want your code to work, recursion won't seem like the best idea.
"A tree is a set of nodes with directed edges between some pair of nodes." These edges connect a parent node to a child node.
A specific type of tree is Binary Tree. In this type of tree each parent only has two children, the left and right. This makes navigating through the tree a little easier.
This week we learnt to traverse through a tree in order to find its height and to find if a value exists in the tree or not.
Another specific tree is the Binary Search Tree. Like it's name suggests, you search for something in a tree. The catch you ask ?
BST (we love abbreviations), has to be made in a specific order. While these specifications might make the task easier, it is slightly confusing to understand.
 |
| Binary Search Tree |
This is an example to understand how the placing of numbers in a BST works.
Each node on the left has to be smaller than all the nodes on its right. As you can see,
9 < 12<14 < 17<19 < 23.....<76.
In this way, searching for a number becomes increasingly simplified.
As far as I understand, trees work in a certain way, which is the key to coding with recursion for trees.
Until next time.. !
PS - Did anyone get the song reference ? *no treble*
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