NOTE
Tree Data Structures
Rooted trees, binary trees, BSTs, balanced trees, traversals, heaps, tries, and B-tree families.
This is a historical learning note and may contain outdated or incomplete understanding.
A tree models hierarchical parent/child relationships without cycles in the usual rooted-tree sense.
Binary-tree traversals include preorder, inorder, postorder, and level-order. A binary search tree adds an ordering invariant; without balancing it can degrade to linear height. Balanced trees such as AVL/red-black variants bound height.
Heaps optimize root priority rather than arbitrary search. Tries optimize prefix-key lookup. B/B+ tree families use high fan-out for page-oriented storage.
Choose a tree by the operations/invariants required, not by the word “tree” alone.