Searching, Sorting and Recursion

Find and order data with classic algorithms, and write functions that call themselves.

Part of Python Programming · Essentials (chapter 3)

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Courses in This Path (3)

Find It and Put It in Order

Finding things and putting them in order are the two most common jobs in computing. A phone finds a contact among thousands, and a website lists the cheapest items first. In this course you search a list item by item and then by halving it, you see why the second way is so much faster, and you sort lists with Python's tools and with small sorting methods that you write yourself. A lesson on counting the work shows how to compare methods by the number of steps they need, and why the answer matters when the list grows. A class ranking with ties is the project at the end. The practice runs your code on many lists and tells you which results are wrong.

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A Function That Calls Itself

Recursion is a function that calls itself on a smaller problem. It sounds strange at first, but it is how we naturally think about problems that contain smaller copies of themselves: a folder inside a folder, a word whose last part is a shorter word, a tower of discs that holds a smaller tower. In this course you find the base case that stops the calls, write countdowns, sums, factorials, powers and Fibonacci numbers, follow the call stack going down and coming back up, and see why the simple Fibonacci function is slow. You use recursion on text and lists, and you finish with a project that walks through folders inside folders. The practice runs your functions on many inputs and tells you which ones fail.

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