How Can I Get a Better Grasp on Recursion and the Call Stack?

Honestly, understanding recursion is all about practice—it's the concept itself. You already did that by diving into the Tenenbaum book.

One of the best ways to understand recursion is to write a lot of code! Try creating both recursive and non-recursive functions, and watch how they operate. Use a debugger to inspect the call stack and view the local variables in each frame. Watching some YouTube tutorials with animations that illustrate how the call stack grows and shrinks in real-time can also help. Just experimenting with the code will give you a clearer picture of how recursion works.

Using a debugger can really help! Most modern IDEs have debugging tools with breakpoints that allow you to step through your code and see how it behaves in real-time. You can break at any point and examine the current state of the call stack and values. Although some people find it time-consuming, it’s an effective way to visualize the execution flow.