The binary and binary search trees

A node in a binary tree has two children at most: one left child and one right child. This definition allows us to write more efficient algorithms to insert, search, and delete nodes to/from a tree. Binary trees are largely used in computer science.

A binary search tree (BST) is a binary tree, but it only allows you to store nodes with lesser values on the left-hand side and nodes with greater values on the right-hand side. The diagram in the previous topic exemplifies a binary search tree.

This will be the data structure that we will work on in this chapter.

Creating the Node and BinarySearchTree classes

Let’s start by creating our Node class that will represent each node of our binary search tree using the following code:

export class Node {
  constructor(key) {
    this.key = key; // {1} node value
    this.left = null; // left child node reference
    this.right = null; // right child node reference
  }
}

The following diagram exemplifies how a binary search...