Week 11

I feel recursion is one of most important topics in computer science. Week 6 we learned recursion, I also talked about it in my SLOG for that week. At that time, to me it seemed that writing recursive code was comparatively easier than tracing it. Although both of these jobs were hard for me. For test 2 when we were going to be tested for it I had to solve a lot of example problems to completely understand the topic. My main focus was recursion as I knew the rest of the topics well. After doing a number of problems and going to office hours of my professor, I finally learnt how to write and trace recursive code properly. I think office hours are an extremely advantageous thing and every student should make use of it. A few days ago when I was going through some of the SLOGs of other students, I realized that there were only a few who felt the same as I did about recursion. The labs on tree and binary tree were a great deal of help in my process of understanding recursion as they tested this concept very well. Now I can confidently say:

The rest of the topics in the course are not very complicated, one can understand them with little effort. Recursion is the only topic I felt was tricky and it was very easy to get confusing when writing recursive code especially when the base case is not straight forward. I am glad that I have finally aced the topic. Now that we have started learning about Big O, I am anticipating it to be the next difficult topic in line for me. It seems quite complicated so I hope I am able to understand it the same way as I understand recursion.