CSC148 Week #7

   Reading week is over and Assignment 2 is up with the deadline fast approaching!!! I haven’t posted anything on week 6 because I was busy with studying for my other midterms, along with fixing some ‘last-minute’ errors in my Assignment 1. On the other hand, reading week was a great relaxer for me although it was too short! I am disappointed in myself because I planned how I would spend my reading week productively, but in the end, I did not do ANY work, when I should have started working on my Assignment 2. Additionally, the first CSC148 midterm occurred this week Wednesday (February 26, 2014). I must say the exam was quite easy although I did make a few mistakes in one/two of the questions, which I hope doesn’t cost me a lot of marks. Anyways, in the end of last week and this week’s lecture we examined a new concept of recursion in Python…that is Trees.

   A Tree is a class – it has its own parameters and methods or functions. A Tree is used to store data in Python, and its structure is like real tree that is linked by nodes, which can have zero or more ‘children’ and at most one ‘parent’. Some terms to be familiar with when dealing with Trees in Python are root, leaves, internal nodes, subtree and forest. More than one trees in Python is called a FOREST (LOL), and a subtree is a portion of a Tree structure. Internal nodes are just as the name says…nodes that are ‘inside’ a tree, and has children, so they are not leaves or a root. Leaves are the nodes at the bottom level of a Tree, while a root is the node at the top of a Tree (which is the opposite of a real tree). Having these terms/names helps me remember its features by relating it to a real tree.

   I have noticed that recursion plays a major role in Trees. Trees have some main functions like height, which is the maximum or longest path from some node to a leaf, and depth, which is the length of the path of a node to its root. Also, the main method used to analyze a Tree is called traversal, which comprises of preorder, inorder & postorder. For more information on each traversal method, see the link below, which someone brilliantly shared on Piazza (the course ‘forum’ website). 

   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83qfcisjol4&feature=youtu.be