What is the best way to organize a class and its objects?

Question

Programming

I used to write in C.
Now I write in C ++, I know the materiel, but the question arose about the organization of the class structure.
Let's say there is data that will eventually be used as a binary tree (or list, which is not so important) for further adding / changing / processing this data.
Now the point is:
what is the most natural way to organize a class in this case?
1) each node of the tree is an object of the desired class
2) there is only one class object and it contains a pointer to the top of the tree

Answer 1

Don't try to reinvent the wheel, everything has already been invented.
If you really want "your own", I advise you to look at existing implementations, find strengths and try to eliminate shortcomings. For example Binary Tree , Linked List

Answer 2

If you only have a pointer to the top of the tree, then how will you continue to walk along the branches of this tree - without pointers to them?
In my opinion, for a tree node, you need something like this:

template<class T>
struct Node
{
Node* left, *right;
T data;
};

Answer 3

Everything has already been invented before us - Visitor Pattern