A tree structure is almost like a linked list: each node has branches—in the case of a binary tree, there are two—which represent children of that node. Since these children have children of their own, the node count grows exponentially, building a hierarchical structure that looks like a regular tree turned on its head.
Binary trees are a subset of these structures with only two branches, typically called left and right. However, that does not inherently help the tree's performance. This is why using a binary search tree, where left represents the smaller or equal value to its parent, and right anything that's greater than that parent node, was established!
If that was confusing, don't worry; there will be code. First, some vocabulary though: what would you call the far ends of the tree? Leaves. Cutting off branches? Pruning. The...