Understanding and Using Heaps

A heap is a specialized data structure that is based on the tree abstract data type and used in many algorithms and data structures. A common data structure that can be built using a heap is the Priority Queue. Also, one of the most popular and efficient sorting algorithms that heap sort is based on is heap data structure. In this chapter, we are going to discuss a heap's properties, different variants of heaps, and heap operations. We will also discover the heap sort and will be implementing heap using SPL as we progress through the chapter. We are now going to explore the heap and its definition in the next section.