Striver's Recursion & Backtracking Series: study plan and how long it takes
The take U forward playlist is 22 videos and 9.7 hours long. Here's how long it takes at different paces, a week-by-week schedule built from the real videos, and a planner that turns it into your own daily plan.
22 videos · 9.7 hours · take U forward
This take U forward playlist starts from what recursion is and builds up to backtracking problems: subsequences, combination sum, subset sums, permutations, N-Queens, Sudoku, palindrome partitioning and the k-th permutation, with merge sort, quick sort and count inversions along the way.
It's short enough to finish in a week or two and is the foundation for Striver's trees, graphs and DP series.
Who it's for: Beginners in DSA who find recursion confusing, and anyone about to start dynamic programming.
How long does it take?
The full playlist is 9.7 hours across 22 videos. Here's roughly how many days that is at different daily watch times and speeds, counting video time only:
| Daily time | At 1x | At 1.5x | At 2x |
|---|---|---|---|
| 30 min a day | 20 days | 13 days | 10 days |
| 1 h a day | 10 days | 7 days | 5 days |
| 2 h a day | 5 days | 4 days | 3 days |
Make your own schedule
The playlist link is already filled in. Press Plan, set how much time you have each day and your speed, and you'll get a day-by-day schedule with a finish date and a calendar file. It reads the live playlist, so new videos are included.
Week-by-week schedule
A sample plan at 1 hour a day and normal speed, using whole videos so none is split across days. That's 2 weeks in total. For a different pace, start date or speed, use the planner above.
Week 1Videos 1–13 · 5h 58m
Day 1 · 45m
- 1Re 1. Introduction to Recursion | Recursion Tree | Stack Space | Strivers A2Z DSA Course23m
- 2Re 2. Problems on Recursion | Strivers A2Z DSA Course22m
Day 2 · 55m
- 3Re 3. Parameterised and Functional Recursion | Strivers A2Z DSA Course18m
- 4Re 4. Problems on Functional Recursion | Strivers A2Z DSA Course20m
- 5Re 5. Multiple Recursion Calls | Problems | Strivers A2Z DSA Course17m
Day 3 · 59m
- 6L6. Recursion on Subsequences | Printing Subsequences25m
- 7L7. All Kind of Patterns in Recursion | Print All | Print one | Count34m
Day 4 · 50m
- 8Merge Sort | Algorithm | Pseudocode | Dry Run | Code | Strivers A2Z DSA Course50m
Day 5 · 35m
- 9Quick Sort For Beginners | Strivers A2Z DSA Course35m
Day 6 · 1h
- 10L8. Combination Sum | Recursion | Leetcode | C++ | Java27m
- 11L9. Combination Sum II | Leetcode | Recursion | Java | C++33m
Day 7 · 55m
- 12L10. Subset Sum I | Recursion | C++ | Java24m
- 13L11. Subset Sum II | Leetcode | Recursion30m
Week 2Videos 14–22 · 3h 44m
Day 8 · 37m
- 14L12. Print all Permutations of a String/Array | Recursion | Approach - 119m
- 15L13. Print all Permutations of a String/Array | Recursion | Approach - 218m
Day 9 · 37m
- 16L14. N-Queens | Leetcode Hard | Backtracking37m
Day 10 · 51m
- 17L15. Sudoko Solver | Backtracking26m
- 18L16. M-Coloring Problem | Backtracking25m
Day 11 · 50m
- 19L17. Palindrome Partitioning | Leetcode | Recursion | C++ | Java25m
- 20L19. Rat in A Maze | Backtracking25m
Day 12 · 49m
- 21L18. K-th Permutation Sequence | Leetcode25m
- 22Count Inversions in an Array | Brute and Optimal24m
Tips for finishing
- Draw the recursion tree on paper for the first few problems. It's the single habit that makes backtracking click.
- Finish this before the DP series; Striver's DP videos assume you can write the recursive solution first.