Induction and Recursion… and Reduction

Abstract

In this chapter, I lay the foundations for your algorithm design skills. Algorithm design can be a hard thing to teach, because there are no clear recipes to follow. There are some foundational principles, though, and one that pops up again and again is the principle of abstraction. I’m betting you’re quite familiar with several kinds of abstraction already—most importantly, procedural (or functional) abstraction and object orientation. Both of these approaches let you isolate parts of your code and minimize the interactions between them so you can focus on a few concepts at a time.