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

Binary trees


A binary tree is one in which each node has a maximum of two children. Binary trees are very common and we shall use them to build up a BST implementation in Python.

The following figure is an example of a binary tree with 5 being the root node:

Each child is identified as being the right or left child of its parent. Since the parent node is also a node by itself, each node will hold a reference to a right and left node even if the nodes do not exist.

A regular binary tree has no rules as to how elements are arranged in the tree. It only satisfies the condition that each node should have a maximum of two children.

Binary search trees

A binary search tree (BST) is a special kind of a binary tree. That is, it is a tree that is structurally a binary tree. Functionally, it is a tree that stores its nodes in such a way to be able to search through the tree efficiently.

There is a structure to a BST. For a given node with a value, all the nodes in the left sub-tree are less than or equal...