Concept of trees in C:

The concept of trees is same to real world tree. In real word every tree has roots, and can have many branches. Each branch can have sub-branches. If you look at branches and sub-branches as a whole, the combination looks like a tree (lets call it a sub-tree). Same is the case of a tree in programming jargon. There is only one difference in plotting the trees. A real world tree has roots on the downside while in C programming, a tree is upside down which has roots on the top and sub-trees below that. Tree is a variation of linked lists.

Here in programming the most commonly used tree is a binary tree. Now lets come to data-structural jargon. A binary tree is a tree in a tree (data structure) in which each node (say current node) has addresses of 2 next possible nodes. The current node is called parent node and these next 2 nodes are called children of that node. We'll call them left child and right child. From the current node, if you want to come down, you have 2 options (either you can come on left child or the right child).

You people have seen that we can traverse a singly linked list in one direction and doubly linked list in two directions in the similar way in a tree you can reach max three nodes from a current node. So in a binary tree each node has only 2 address pointers, you can traverse only in the down direction. If you want to traverse the tree in both the directions (downward as well as upward), each node must be having address of its parent node also.

Here the node structure is a bit different. You can think of a binary tree as a continuation of linked lists from singly to doubly to binary tree. Let me explain further. In node of a singly connected linked list we have one single pointer pointing to next node and in node of a doubly connected linked list we have 2 pointers which can point to other 2 nodes (next and previous nodes). Similarly in a node of a binary tree we have 3 pointers which can point to 3 other nodes one to parent, one to left child, one to right child so that we can traverse easily in both the directions.