Book Image

Learning JavaScript Data Structures and Algorithms - Third Edition

Book Image

Learning JavaScript Data Structures and Algorithms - Third Edition

Overview of this book

A data structure is a particular way of organizing data in a computer to utilize resources efficiently. Data structures and algorithms are the base of every solution to any programming problem. With this book, you will learn to write complex and powerful code using the latest ES 2017 features. Learning JavaScript Data Structures and Algorithms begins by covering the basics of JavaScript and introduces you to ECMAScript 2017, before gradually moving on to the most important data structures such as arrays, queues, stacks, and linked lists. You will gain in-depth knowledge of how hash tables and set data structures function as well as how trees and hash maps can be used to search files in an HD or represent a database. This book serves as a route to take you deeper into JavaScript. You’ll also get a greater understanding of why and how graphs, one of the most complex data structures, are largely used in GPS navigation systems in social networks. Toward the end of the book, you’ll discover how all the theories presented in this book can be applied to solve real-world problems while working on your own computer networks and Facebook searches.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Title Page
Dedication
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Tree traversal


Traversing (or walking) a tree is the process of visiting all the nodes of a tree and performing an operation at each node. However, how should we do this? Should we start from the top of the tree or from the bottom? From the left-hand or the right-hand side? There are three different approaches that can be used to visit all the nodes in a tree: in-order, pre-order, and post-order.

In the following sections, we will dive into the uses and implementations of these three types of tree traversals.

In-order traversal

An in-order traversal visits all the nodes of a BST in an ascending order, meaning it will visit the nodes from the smallest to the largest. An application of in-order traversal would be to sort a tree. Let's check out its implementation:

inOrderTraverse(callback) {
  this.inOrderTraverseNode(this.root, callback); // {1}
}

The inOrderTraverse method receives a callback function as a parameter. This function can be used to perform the action we want to execute when the...