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Learn Recursion, Dammit

Daniel Zingaro

Did you know that recursion is the same as induction? That you have an inductive hypothesis and that you're allowed to assume n-1 and AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Stop it. I don't care about that right now.

I care about teaching you recursion and not scaring you off. We are going to do this using Python and the best examples and explanations that I know.

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About

About

About the Book

Learn recursion, once and for all.

Tired of people saying that recursion is easy? Tired of seeing the same Fibonacci and factorial examples everywhere? None of that here. No FIBbing.

Recursion is not easy. If it were, you wouldn't be here right now. But, with practice and a good coach, you can do this. You are smart. Anyone who has told you that you can't learn recursion is not.

I've taught recursion to thousands of students over the past 15 years. I'm ready to help you. Let's freakin' do this already :)

Minimum price will increase as I write more stuff -- grab now!

I appreciate any donations, and they will encourage me to continue this work and/or feed my saltines addiction, but I cannot promise a timeline or amount of content. I'll do my best.

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Python

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Author

About the Author

Daniel Zingaro

Dr. Daniel Zingaro is an associate teaching professor of computer science and award-winning teacher at the University of Toronto. His main area of research is computer science education, where he studies how students learn computer science material.

He may have a book obsession. He has written

Learn AI-assisted Python Programming with GitHub Copilot and ChatGPT (with Leo Porter, Manning, 2024). Learn programming in the generative AI era!

Algorithmic Thinking 2/e (No Starch Press, 2024). Learn hash tables, recursion, dynamic programming, trees, graphs, and all kinds of other awesome algorithms and data structures stuff... competitive programming examples!

Learn to Code by Solving Problems (No Starch Press, 2021). Learn programming from scratch while solving competitive programming puzzles. Class tested and refined with hundreds of real students.

Contents

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: The Bad Dogs Problem

  1. Bad Dogs
  2. Bonus: Returning the Valid Configurations
  3. Summary: What the Hell Is Recursion, Then?

Chapter 2: The Best Team Problem

  1. The Best Team

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