Heaps

A heap data structure is a specialization of a tree in which the nodes are ordered in a specific way. A heap is a data structure where each data elements satisfies a heap property, and the heap property states that there must be a certain relationship between a parent node and its child nodes. According to this certain relationship in the tree, the heaps can be of two types, in other words, max heaps and min heaps. In a max heap, each parent node value must always be greater than or equal to all its children. In this kind of tree, the root node must be the greatest value in the tree. For example, see Figure 7.1 showing the max heap in which all the nodes have greater values compared to their children:

Figure 7.1: An example of a max heap

In a min heap, the relationship between parent and children is that the value of the parent node must always be less than or equal to its children. This rule should be followed by all the nodes in the tree. In the min heap, the...