I’ve been teaching “Applied Algorithms and Programming Techniques” and we just reached the topic of AVL Trees. Having taught half of the AVL tree concept, I decided to code it in python – my newest adventure. Bear in mind that I have never actually coded an AVL tree before and I’m not particularly comfortable with python. I thought it would be a good idea to experiment with both of them at the same time. So, I started up my python IDE (that’s Aptana Studio, btw) and started coding.
For the newbie programmer, the code itself may not be very useful since you can find better code online. The benefit is in being able to look at the process. You can take a look at the commits I made along the way over here on github. You can take a look at how I structured the code when I began and how I added bits and pieces. This abstraction should help in solving other problems as well. The final code (along with a rigorous unit test file) can be seen here: https://github.com/recluze/python-avl-tree