6
Trees and Graphs

Trees and graphs are common data structures, so both are fair game in a programming interview. Tree problems are more common, however, because they are simple enough to implement within the time constraints of an interview and enable an interviewer to test your understanding of recursion and runtime analysis. Graph problems are important but often more time-consuming to solve and code, so you won’t see them as frequently.

Unlike the previous chapter’s focus on implementations in C, this and subsequent chapters focus on implementations in more modern object-oriented languages.