W4: Recursion... Uhh, What?

In the outline for SLOGs, it says that we'll be writing a post in recursion week 7. Honestly, right now I can't imagine understanding recursion enough to write a full out post on it.

Underneath the topic listings, there were the suggestions for weekly blog posts:

And I will easily answer questions several of the questions right here:

Something new I learned this week? That would be recursion.
What's something that frustrated me this week? Again, recursion.
How confident do you feel about material covered this week? Nil. Zilch. Not at all confident. AT ALL.
What was one of your achievements this week? I have had no achievements.
Ask, and then answer, some question you had about course content? I would if I knew enough about the topic to ask questions...

All jokes aside however, I am rather worried by recursion. By the professor's lengthy praise for the topic, I can tell that recursion is a major tool in the computer programming toolbox, and I'd better learn it fast.

While I understand the human process of going through a nested list and counting, I found it difficult at first to follow the prof's instructions on tracing. My first few tries at tracing, I traced every step to the bottom before I could condense the steps at the top-level.

EDIT: I've looked again at the code from lecture (depth of nested list, maximum in a nested list) which completely befuddled me in class. It helps, I find, to copy and paste the code into Python and try to understand each part of the code. Especially with the ternary if statements (which I am horrible at), it's useful to attempt to rewrite the function. If my rewritten function is faulty, I can look at the differences in code and eventually learn why each part is important.