In the preceding chapter, we introduced the concept of data structures by looking at arrays, linked lists, queues, and stacks. In this chapter, we will use some of these primitive structures to build more complex ones. We'll start the chapter by looking at hash tables, which are useful data structures for fast key-value lookup. In the second part of the chapter, we will learn about a more complex data structure that supports range queries, called binary trees.

By the end of this chapter, you will be able to:

• Describe how hash tables work
• Implement two main techniques to deal with hash collisions
• Characterize different hashing choices
• Explain the terminology, structure, and operations of binary trees
• Demonstrate various tree traversal techniques
• Define balanced binary search trees