Hands-On Data Structures and Algorithms with JavaScript

Using dynamic programming to build a financial planner

Dynamic programming (DP) is a very common and powerful approach to solve a certain class of problems. These problems present themselves in ways in which the main problem can be divided into sub-problems and the sub-problems can be broken down further into smaller problems, with some overlap in between.

DP is often confused with recursion because of their similarities. A DP problem is only a type of problem, whereas recursion is part of the solution to such problems. There are two main ways in which we can approach solving such problems:

• Break the problem down to sub-problems: If a sub-problem is solved already then return the saved solution, else solve and save the solution before returning ...