A Beginner's Guide to Tackling Recursion
summary
Covers concrete rules and demos: explains the call stack and why recursion causes stack overflow at about 1,000 calls, shows that raising it with sys.setrecursionlimit can crash the interpreter, visualizes frames with Python Tutor, and contrasts recursive vs iterative implementations for factorial and Fibonacci. Builds a working file-search (depth‑first) using os.listdir/os.path and a Sierpinski fractal with turtle. Shows memoization (functools.lru_cache) fixes Fibonacci’s exponential work; tail‑call elimination is unavailable in CPython.
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chapters (16)
- 0:00Intro
- 2:25Overview
- 3:51Recursion Jokes
- 5:23What is recursion
- 8:32Stacks
- 10:15Python Lists
- 12:53Function Calls
- 14:52Visualize Execution
- 22:45Set Recursion Limit
- 26:05Base Case
- 29:30Recursion
- 42:45Before and After
- 45:45Local Variables
- 50:45Fibonacci Sequence
- 52:45Fibonacci
- 57:45Fibonacci Growth Example
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