Quick Recursion

Recursion is considered to be an “advanced” topic. It shouldn’t be. While this little volume covers a number of advanced topics that involve recursion - tail recursion, pruning, recursive data structures, the use of accumulators, and backtracking - this book shows how recursion itself is actually rather simple.

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Recursion is the best tool for working with trees and graphs. But perhaps you’ve studied recursion and decided it’s too complicated. You just can’t think that way. That limits the kind of programming you can do.

Good news! Recursion is actually easy. It’s just badly taught.

See, many instructors talk about how the computer does it. They go on and on about what happens at each level of the recursion and how each level relates to other levels. The problem is that you can’t think in multiple levels. Nobody can. And you don’t have to.

This book will show you how you can write recursive programs. Once you understand a few simple rules, you will wonder why you ever thought recursion was complicated. You’ll be able to write recursive programs quickly and easily.

Well, as quick and easy as programming ever is, anyway.