Recursion challenge nightmare! I feel like a fraud!

I have to be honest. I didn’t even know where to start with this challenge and I’m sure there’s probably 4-5 different ways to get the output.

For anyone completing this, remember that TeamTreeHouse is looking for a specific set of criteria to pass the challenge. So you may come up with a perfectly acceptable way of getting the right output (via pycharm etc), that might not pass the challenge.

I myself started trying to go down the comprehension route. This to me seems logical as Kenneth keeps banging on about doing things in the simplest, most efficient way. But I couldn’t get it to work.

In the end, I cheated. I ended up searching other people’s answers and trying to understand the logic of what they did. Then I would try and complete the challenge working through the logic of what I was doing. But some parts still had me thinking “I don’t get why I’m writing this code, but everyone else seems to have done it.”

Doing that makes me feel like a fraud and that I’m not really learning, I’m just copying.

Not sure what the answer is, just wanted to share. This challenge feels like too much in just one task!

courses = {'count': 2,
           'title': 'Django Basics',
           'prereqs': [{'count': 3,
                     'title': 'Object-Oriented Python',
                     'prereqs': [{'count': 1,
                               'title': 'Python Collections',
                               'prereqs': [{'count':0,
                                         'title': 'Python Basics',
                                         'prereqs': []}]},
                              {'count': 0,
                               'title': 'Python Basics',
                               'prereqs': []},
                              {'count': 0,
                               'title': 'Setting Up a Local Python Environment',
                               'prereqs': []}]},
                     {'count': 0,
                      'title': 'Flask Basics',
                      'prereqs': []}]}


def prereqs(data, pres=None):
    pres = pres or set()
    for x in data['prereqs']:
        pres.add(x['title'])
        prereqs(x, pres)
    return pres