Traversal
<data> Processing nodes in a
graph one at a time, usually in some specified order.
Traversal of a tree is
recursively defined to mean visiting the
root node and traversing its children.
Visiting a node usually involves transforming it in some way or collecting data from it.
In "pre-order traversal", a node is visited _before_ its children.
In "post-order" traversal, a node is visited _after_ its children.
The more rarely used "in-order" traversal is generally applicable only to binary trees, and is where you visit first a node's left child, then the node itself, and then its right child.
For the binary tree:
T / \ I
S / \ D
E
A pre-order traversal visits the nodes in the order T I D E S. A post-order traversal visits them in the order D E I S T.
An in-order traversal visits them in the order D I E T S.