I have been avoiding this. Ever since I first encountered the binary tree in the Daily Coding Problems, I have been procrastinating on this topic. If ever my impostor syndrome regarding my abilities or designation as a 'programmer' had effect it is in situations like this. But, I can't avoid it forever, and you every journey starts with one step, so here we go!

Binary Trees

A binary tree is a data structure that has at most, two children. Since a binary tree can only have at most 2 children, we name them left or right.

Use Cases

• Typically trees are used to store hierarchical information - ie. files in a computer
• Manipulate hierarchical data
• Make information easy to search (tree traversal)
• Manipulate sorted lists of data
• Multi-stage decision making
• Router algorithms

Attributes

• Moderate access/search (quicker than linked list, slower than arrays)
• Moderate insertion/deletion (quicker than arrays, slower than unordered linked lists)
• Trees don’t have an upper limit on number of nodes as nodes are linked using pointers.

Properties

A node on a tree contains the following:

1. Data
2. A pointer to the left child
3. A pointer to the right child

Terms

• A node with no parent is the root node.
• A node with no children is called a leaf.

Code

Below is the most basic definition of a node in a binary tree:

class Node {
    constructor(data) {
        this.data = data;
        this.left = null;
        this.right = null;
    }

    // Todo
}

To be continued...

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