Chapter 5. Trees and Graphs

Trees and graphs are common data structures in programming, so they are both fair game in a programming interview. Trees, in particular, appear frequently because they enable an interviewer to test your knowledge of recursion and run-time analysis. Trees are also simple enough that you can implement them within the time constraints of an interview. Although graph problems are interesting, they are usually very complicated and do not lend themselves to interview problems. Therefore, the emphasis of this chapter is on trees.

Unlike Chapter 4's use of C/C++ in the problems, in this and the subsequent chapters you're going to use more modern languages like C# and Java. This means you'll be creating classes to properly encapsulate your code and you generally won't be using pointers anymore.