Recursion JS

I highly recommend The Little Schemer for an introduction to recursion. It assumes you have no prior knowledge of how recursion works and walks you through simple to pretty complex examples.

Sorry, I can't explain how it works in depth as it's a very large topic, but I'll try to help.

Helpful resource. For starters, I recommend the resource that made it click for me. It's Kyle Simpson's Functional Light JS book, chapter 8. Here is a link to it on his GitHub: github.com/getify/Functional-Light.... Please note that this is somewhat advanced, so there's no need to master everything he talks about in this chapter.

Trace the code. Secondly, I recommend finding some basic examples and literally tracing through the code from n = 0 to n = 3 or so.

const sumRange = n => {
  if (n <= 0) return 0;
  return n + sumRange(n-1);
};

When I was trying to make sense of the weirdness of recursion, I went through functions like that and literally traced the execution of the code. It definitely helped.

Thinking about recursion

Personally, I think about it like it's magic. It just works, because mathematical induction works. I try not to think much more about it.

Next is how I think about the problem I have to solve: What is the result of sumRange(n)? It's just the result of n + whatever the rest of the answer is. What is the rest of the answer? It's the result of sumRange(n-1), so just call that. Also base case is at n=0 where we return 0.

So yeah, think like that and just trust it to work.

Hope that helped a bit. Please feel free to ask any questions.

For an indepth view, you should consider the below link:

freecodecamp.org/news/how-recursio...