Book Image

Getting Started with Python

By : Fabrizio Romano, Benjamin Baka, Dusty Phillips
Book Image

Getting Started with Python

By: Fabrizio Romano, Benjamin Baka, Dusty Phillips

Overview of this book

This Learning Path helps you get comfortable with the world of Python. It starts with a thorough and practical introduction to Python. You’ll quickly start writing programs, building websites, and working with data by harnessing Python's renowned data science libraries. With the power of linked lists, binary searches, and sorting algorithms, you'll easily create complex data structures, such as graphs, stacks, and queues. After understanding cooperative inheritance, you'll expertly raise, handle, and manipulate exceptions. You will effortlessly integrate the object-oriented and not-so-object-oriented aspects of Python, and create maintainable applications using higher level design patterns. Once you’ve covered core topics, you’ll understand the joy of unit testing and just how easy it is to create unit tests. By the end of this Learning Path, you will have built components that are easy to understand, debug, and can be used across different applications. This Learning Path includes content from the following Packt products: • Learn Python Programming - Second Edition by Fabrizio Romano • Python Data Structures and Algorithms by Benjamin Baka • Python 3 Object-Oriented Programming by Dusty Phillips
Table of Contents (31 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
8
Stacks and Queues
10
Hashing and Symbol Tables
Index

Chapter 9. Trees

A tree is a hierarchical form of data structure. When we dealt with lists, queues, and stacks, items followed each other. But in a tree, there is a parent-child relationship between items.

To visualize what trees look like, imagine a tree growing up from the ground. Now remove that image from your mind. Trees are normally drawn downward, so you would be better off imagining the root structure of the tree growing downward.

At the top of every tree is the so-called root node. This is the ancestor of all other nodes in the tree.

Trees are used for a number of things, such as parsing expressions, and searches. Certain document types, such as XML and HTML, can also be represented in a tree form. We shall look at some of the uses of trees in this chapter.

In this chapter, we will cover the following areas:

  • Terms and definitions of trees
  • Binary trees and binary search trees
  • Tree traversal