What’s the Best Way to Learn Algorithms: Recursive or Iterative?

Just to clarify, saying recursive saves space and iterative saves time isn't quite right. It's not that simple—it depends on the specific scenario you're dealing with. Writing them both out in code can help you really understand the differences!

It really depends on the situation! In most cases, iterative solutions are more efficient, but some problems are inherently recursive. For example, quicksort is super concise when written recursively! On the other hand, some tasks, like counting the length of a linked list, might be more straightforward with an iterative approach.

Most times, iterative methods are preferred because they help avoid stack overflow issues from deep recursion. But it can vary based on the problem; sometimes recursion can lead to cleaner and more intuitive code.

Honestly, you need to be familiar with both! Any algorithm exam will expect you to know the differences between iterative and recursive methods, write code for both, and even switch between them. Unless it’s one of those exams where you just have to memorize everything, I'd say focus on whichever one makes the most sense for the task at hand.