203: Trees: Why Use Them?

Why should you consider using trees? You can find more information about trees in some of the earlier episodes. I’ll try to not repeat the same things here. Episodes 41 and 42 discuss binary trees and left-child right-sibling trees. Episode 54 explains recursion and uses a tree in the examples. And episode 66 explains the composite design pattern which can be thought of as a tree. Listen to these episodes for more details. Trees are great at organizing items. Anytime you have a situation where organization can start out in broad terms and then get more specific, then a tree is great. Listen to the full episode for more examples and insight, or you can also read the full transcript below. And don’t forget to sign up to be a patron of the podcast by clicking the button at the bottom of the page and selecting your reward level. It doesn’t cost much and you can get some awesome benefits such as actual code reviews to help you write better code. Who knows, maybe you might even find out that your code should be using a tree or something else instead. Transcript You can find more information about trees in some of the earlier episodes. I’ll try to not repeat the same things here. Episodes 41 and 42 discuss binary trees and left-child right-sibling trees. Episode 54 explains recursion and uses a tree in the examples. And episode 66 explains the composite design pattern which can be thought of as a tree. Listen to these episodes for more details. A lot of the earlier episodes break about halfway through for a sponsor message. That sponsor is Take Up Code and I used the time to promote live classes. I still organize live classes and that’s a great way for you to supplement your training. Some topics are best explained with actual code instead of just words. There’s a new way that you can get some great extra benefits and help support this podcast at the same time. I just setup a Patreon account with several reward levels for you to choose from. You can get design reviews of your project ideas, code reviews, and participate in game development sessions each month. You can find a link to the Patreon page at the bottom of each Take Up Code website page. There’s also a chance for you to win a free hour of tutoring. And you’ll have the best chances of winning the tutoring right now when the number of patrons is small. I call it tutoring, but really, the main thing is that you can get an hour of some serious experience applied to your project. So visit takeupcode.com today, click on the button to become a patron, and select your reward level. I thank you for your support. Alright back to trees. Instead of going into more theory about how trees work, at least for now, it’s good to ask why you would want to use a tree in the first place. What problems do trees help you to solve? And what difficulties would you face if you tried to avoid them? Trees are great at organizing items. Anytime you have a situation where organization can start out in broad terms and then get more specific, then a tree is great. Maybe you have a store that sells items. You can group them into big top-level groups such as food, furniture, and tools. Then each of these can be further divided into smaller and smaller groups. So maybe you have food, then vegetables, then grains, and finally wheat. Or you can approach the problem from the other direction and think about where you could put a ruler. It’ll be in tools, certainly. But where in tools? Well, that depends on how many different kinds of tools you have or think you might need to organize. If the only tools that your store sells are rulers and saws, then maybe it doesn’t matter and you can just put them both in tools and be done. But when you start getting so many tools that it becomes hard to find what you’re looking for, then that’s when you need to add extra organization levels to your tree. Maybe you can start by splitting all the tool