Why Trees Exist and What Linked Lists and Arrays Cannot Do in DSA Javascript - See It Work

Why Trees Exist and What Linked Lists and Arrays Cannot Do

📖 Scenario: Imagine you are organizing a family reunion. You want to keep track of family members and their relationships, like parents and children. Using simple lists or arrays makes it hard to show these connections clearly. Trees help us organize such data naturally.

🎯 Goal: You will build a simple tree structure using JavaScript objects to represent family members and their children. This will show why trees are useful when linked lists and arrays cannot easily represent hierarchical relationships.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a JavaScript object called familyTree representing a root family member with children.

Add a variable called rootName to store the root member's name.

Write a function called getChildrenNames that returns an array of the root member's children names.

Print the root member's name and the list of children names.

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Trees are used to represent data with hierarchy like file systems, organization charts, and family trees.

💼 Career

Understanding trees is essential for software development roles involving data organization, search algorithms, and UI component trees.

1

Create the family tree object

Create a JavaScript object called familyTree with a name property set to 'Grandparent' and a children property which is an array containing two objects. The first child object should have name set to 'Parent1' and an empty children array. The second child object should have name set to 'Parent2' and an empty children array.

DSA Javascript

# Your code here

Hint

Use nested objects and arrays to represent the family tree structure.

2

Add a variable for the root member's name

Create a variable called rootName and set it to the name property of the familyTree object.

DSA Javascript

const familyTree = {
  name: 'Grandparent',
  children: [
    { name: 'Parent1', children: [] },
    { name: 'Parent2', children: [] }
  ]
};

// Your code here

Hint

Access the name property of the familyTree object and assign it to rootName.

3

Write a function to get children names

Write a function called getChildrenNames that takes the familyTree object as a parameter and returns an array of the name properties of its children.

DSA Javascript

const familyTree = {
  name: 'Grandparent',
  children: [
    { name: 'Parent1', children: [] },
    { name: 'Parent2', children: [] }
  ]
};

const rootName = familyTree.name;

// Your code here

Hint

Use the map method on the children array to get their names.

4

Print the root name and children names

Print the rootName variable and then print the result of calling getChildrenNames(familyTree).

DSA Javascript

const familyTree = {
  name: 'Grandparent',
  children: [
    { name: 'Parent1', children: [] },
    { name: 'Parent2', children: [] }
  ]
};

const rootName = familyTree.name;

function getChildrenNames(tree) {
  return tree.children.map(child => child.name);
}

// Your code here

Hint

Use console.log to print the values.