Post Order binary tree traversal in Java - Recursion and Iteration

This is the third article on tree traversal. In the last couple of articles, I have shown you how to implement preorder and inorder traversal in Java, both recursively and iteratively and today, you will learn about the post order traversal. Out of these three main tree traversal algorithms, the post-order traversal is most difficult to implement, especially the iterative version. In post order traversal, you first visit left subtree, then right subtree and at last you print the value of root or not. So, the value of root is always printed at last in the post-order traversal. As I told you before, all three preOrder, inOrder, and postOrder are depth-first algorithms so they go down in the binary tree first before visiting nodes of the same level. The implementation of the recursive algorithm is very simple, you just need to adjust the order of recursive call according to the algorithm and you are done, but iterative algorithm requires some effort to get it right, which you will see in this article.

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How to Print all Leaf Nodes of Binary tree in Java - Recursion and Stack

Binary tree based questions are very common in Java or any other Programming job interviews. One of the frequently asked binary tree questions is "write a program to print all leaf nodes of a binary tree". In order to solve this problem, you must know what is a leaf node? A leaf node in a binary tree is a node whose left and right child is null. They are actually the last nodes of any binary tree. In a typical programming interview, you would be given a binary tree and asked to write a program to print all leaf nodes. Usually, all binary tree related questions can be solved easily using recursion because a tree is a recursive data structure, but you should also know how to solve them without recursion.

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InOrder traversal of Binary tree in Java using Recursion and Iteration

This is the second article about tree traversal algorithms using Java. In the first part, we have seen the pre-order algorithm for visiting all nodes of the binary tree and today we'll learn about the InOrder traversal. As I told you before, unlike array and linked list, binary tree has several ways of traversal. The traversal algorithms are broadly divided into depth first and breadth first traversal algorithms depending upon how algorithm actually works. As the name suggest, depth first explores binary tree towards depth before visiting sibling, while breath first visits all nodes in the same level before going to next level, hence it is also known as level order traversal. Both PreOrder and InOrder tree traversal algorithms are depth first and the only difference between pre-order and in-order algorithm is the order on which root, left node, and right node of the binary tree is visited.

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Binary Tree PreOrder Traversal in Java - Recursion and Iteration Example

Unlike linked list and array which can only be traversed linearly, there are several ways to traverse a binary tree. The tree traversal algorithms are mainly divided into two parts, depth first and breadth first. As their name suggests, in depth first, the tree is traversed downwards (towards the depth) before the next sibling is visited, the PreOrder, InOrder and PostOrder traversal of a binary tree are actually depth-first traversals. On the breadth first, the entire breadth of the tree is traversed before moving to next level, hence it is also known as level order traversal. There are other algorithms to traverse a binary tree as well e.g. Monte Carlo tree search, which concentrates on analyzing the most promising moves, but the pre-order, post-order, and in-order traversal are the most popular ways to traverse a binary tree in Java. They are also the most popular data structure and algorithm questions at beginner and intermediate level.

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