Data Structures and Algorithms
with Object-Oriented Design Patterns in Java 
There are many different applications of graphs. As a result, there are many different algorithms for manipulating them. However, many of the different graph algorithms have in common the characteristic that they systematically visit all the vertices in the graph. That is, the algorithm walks through the graph data structure and performs some computation at each vertex in the graph. This process of walking through the graph is called a graph traversal .
While there are many different possible ways in which to systematically visit all the vertices of a graph, certain traversal methods occur frequently enough that they are given names of their own. This section presents three of them--depth-first traversal, breadth-first traversal and topological sort.
Copyright © 1998 by Bruno R. Preiss, P.Eng. All rights reserved.