Node - A Tree node is a component which may contain it’s own values, and references to other nodes Root - The root is the node at the beginning of the tree K - A number that specifies the maximum number of children any node may have in a k-ary tree. In a binary tree, k = 2. Left - A reference to one child node, in a binary tree Right - A reference to the other child node, in a binary tree Edge - The edge in a tree is the link between a parent and child node Leaf - A leaf is a node that does not have any children Height - The height of a tree is the number of edges from the root to the furthest leaf
An important aspect of trees is how to traverse them. Traversing a tree allows us to search for a node, print out the contents of a tree, and much more! There are two categories of traversals when it comes to trees:
Depth First Breadth First
In all of our examples, we’ve been using a Binary Tree. Trees can have any number of children per node, but Binary Trees restrict the number of children to two (hence our left and right children).
If Nodes are able have more than 2 child nodes, we call the tree that contains them a K-ary Tree. In this type of tree we use K to refer to the maximum number of children that each Node is able to have.
