Reread Chapter 18

As it turns out Chapter 18 only less than 20 pages.  While it's still more in-depth than many discussions of balanced trees, one can see the authors are not big on this topic (like deletion is not even described and left for the author).

In any case,  though the algorithm is more difficult than a binary tree.  It is much easier to understand than red-black tree.  More importantly - it is simpler to visualize what really going on.  So I decide to skip the algorithmic description for the moment.

B-tree and 2-3 tree

Now I see.

As it turns out the operation of B-tree is probably much simpler than red-black tree. (In a way I think RB tree is actually more advanced).

You can also gauge the difficulty of the class by how much it discuss balanced trees.  In fact, most of the time, you will only see cursory description of them like insertion in an introductory class.

This is good.  That means if I review Chapter 16, I will probably know how to do all the problems in HW4.

Lectures note for HW4

Hmm, here comes a tougher part,  issues such as binary tree, balanced trees such as 2-3 trees and B-tree are tougher to understand topic.   Ok, this is a good time to really understand them though.  It also related to my reading in CLRS Chapter 12 and Chapter 13.