Grokking the Art of Recursion for Coding Interviews
Recursion taught as a technique you can trust rather than one you hope works, covering base cases, the call stack, backtracking and the conversion to iteration. It is the prerequisite for trees, graphs and dynamic programming all at once.
Course
Interview Prep
Design Gurus
1 to 2 weeks
Beginner
Subscription
Why start here
Recursion is the shared foundation under three of the hardest interview topics. Candidates who find trees, graphs and dynamic programming all difficult usually do not have three problems. They have one, and it is that they do not trust recursion enough to write it without tracing every call by hand.
What it covers
Base cases and why an incorrect one produces silence rather than an error, what the call stack actually holds, backtracking as recursion with undo, the standard subset and permutation generators, and when to convert recursion to an explicit stack.
How to use it
Stop tracing. Practise writing the recursive case assuming the function already works for smaller inputs, and check only the base case. Reaching the point where you can do that without anxiety is the entire goal.
Best for: self taught engineers and students who avoid recursive solutions on instinct.
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