Take the 2-minute tour ×  What are the main differences between
a Linked List and a BinarySearchTree? Is BST just a way of
maintaining a LinkedList? My instructor talked about LinkedList
and then BST but did't compare them or didn't say when to prefer
one over another. This is probably a dumb question but I'm
really confused. I would appreciate if someone can clarify this
in a simple manner.  share|improve this question add comment  13
Answers  up vote 40 down vote accepted  Linked List:  Item(1) ->
Item(2) -> Item(3) -> Item(4) -> Item(5) -> Item(6) -> Item(7)
Binary tree:             /    \           /      Node(3)
\      Node(5)            \    /  In a linked list, the items
are linked together through a single next pointer. In a binary
tree, each node can have 0, 1 or 2 subnodes, where (in case of a
binary search tree) the key of the left node is lesser than the
key of the node and the key of the right node is more than the
node. As long as the tree is balanced, the searchpath to each
item is a