The Recursive Book of Recursion

Foreword

When I was approached by Al to write the foreword to this book, I was pretty excited about the prospect. A book on recursion! Now, that’s something you just don’t see every day. Considered by many to be one of the more mysterious topics in programming, recursion is often discouraged. Oddly, this stands in stark contrast to its storied use in weird job interview questions.

However, there are all sorts of practical reasons to learn about recursion. Recursive thinking is very much a mindset about problem-solving. At its core, larger problems get broken into smaller problems. And sometimes along the way, hard problems are rewritten into equivalent but easier-to-solve simple problems. This sort of thinking can be a useful tool when applied ...