Introduction to Binary Search Trees
Explore the fundamentals of binary search trees including their structure, ordering rules, and efficient operations such as search and insertion. Understand how inorder traversal returns sorted data and why maintaining tree balance is crucial for performance. This lesson provides a foundation for using BSTs in problem-solving and advanced data structures.
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A binary tree is a data structure where each node has at most two children: a left child and a right child.
A binary search tree (BST) is a special type of binary tree that maintains an ordering rule:
All values in the left subtree are smaller than the node.
All values in the right subtree are greater than or equal to the node.
This rule applies recursively to every node.
For example, if the root is