Check out PragProg ‘Learn Functional Programming with Elixir’ chapter on recursion. That might help.

I agree - I learnt some really cool things in that book!

#book-learn-functional-programming-with-elixir

Here’s my review of it:

The book’s author @ulissesalmeida is here on Devtalk too

There’s an awesome book that’s not about Elixir at all called The Little Schemer which is a fun and illuminating way to learn recursion and functional-ish stuff like linked lists. It’s written as a fun quiz that asks questions before you could know the answer, so that you have to guess about things before being exposed to them. Scheme is a lisp, but it actually shares a great deal with Elixir. I printed out a copy of the book that I found online and went though it like that, without touching a keyboard. You’ll quickly be doing recursion in your head and it will makes total sense and will be fun, and I think several parts of the structure of a language like Elixir will open up to you. At least it seemed to help me in that way.