110 Balanced Binary Tree

Given the following tree [1,2,2,3,3,null,null,4,4]:

       1
      / \
     2   2
    / \
   3   3
  / \
 4   4
Return false.

return value of helper function indicates the height of the node

postorder traversal

/**
 * Definition for a binary tree node.
 * public class TreeNode {
 *     int val;
 *     TreeNode left;
 *     TreeNode right;
 *     TreeNode(int x) { val = x; }
 * }
 */
class Solution {
    public boolean isBalanced(TreeNode root) {
        if (root == null) {
            return true;
        }
        return helper(root) != - 1;
    }
    public int helper(TreeNode root) {
        if (root == null) {
            return 0;
        }
        int left = helper(root.left);
        int right = helper(root.right);
        if (left == -1 || right == -1 || Math.abs(left - right) > 1) {
            return -1;
        }
        return Math.max(left + 1, right + 1);
    }
}