BST Property and Why It Matters in DSA Typescript - Build from Scratch

BST Property and Why It Matters

📖 Scenario: Imagine you are organizing a collection of books by their unique ID numbers. You want to store them so that you can quickly find any book by its ID. A Binary Search Tree (BST) helps you do this by keeping smaller IDs on the left and larger IDs on the right.

🎯 Goal: You will build a simple Binary Search Tree (BST) with three nodes and then print the tree structure to see how the BST property keeps the data organized.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a BST node class with value, left, and right properties

Create three nodes with values 10, 5, and 15

Link the nodes to form a BST where 5 is left child of 10 and 15 is right child of 10

Print the tree nodes in order: root, left child, right child

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

BSTs are used in databases and file systems to quickly find, add, or remove data by keeping it organized.

💼 Career

Understanding BSTs helps in software engineering roles that involve data storage, search optimization, and algorithm design.

1

Create BST Node Class

Create a class called BSTNode with a constructor that takes a value of type number and initializes left and right properties to null.

DSA Typescript

// Your code here

Hint

Think of each node as a box holding a number and two empty spots for smaller and larger numbers.

2

Create Three BST Nodes

Create three variables called root, leftChild, and rightChild and assign them new BSTNode instances with values 10, 5, and 15 respectively.

DSA Typescript

class BSTNode {
    value: number;
    left: BSTNode | null;
    right: BSTNode | null;

    constructor(value: number) {
        this.value = value;
        this.left = null;
        this.right = null;
    }
}

// Create three BSTNode instances
// Your code here

Hint

Use the new keyword to create nodes with the given values.

3

Link Nodes to Form BST

Link the nodes by setting root.left to leftChild and root.right to rightChild to form a BST where smaller values go left and larger values go right.

DSA Typescript

class BSTNode {
    value: number;
    left: BSTNode | null;
    right: BSTNode | null;

    constructor(value: number) {
        this.value = value;
        this.left = null;
        this.right = null;
    }
}

const root = new BSTNode(10);
const leftChild = new BSTNode(5);
const rightChild = new BSTNode(15);

// Link nodes to form BST
// Your code here

Hint

Remember, smaller values go to the left child, larger values to the right child.

4

Print BST Node Values

Print the values of root, root.left, and root.right in order using three separate console.log statements.

DSA Typescript

class BSTNode {
    value: number;
    left: BSTNode | null;
    right: BSTNode | null;

    constructor(value: number) {
        this.value = value;
        this.left = null;
        this.right = null;
    }
}

const root = new BSTNode(10);
const leftChild = new BSTNode(5);
const rightChild = new BSTNode(15);

root.left = leftChild;
root.right = rightChild;

// Print the values of root, root.left, and root.right
// Your code here

Hint

Use console.log to print each node's value. Use optional chaining ?. for safety.