When working with recursive solutions, I always try to:
- Establish the base case first i.e.
when n = 1 in a solution to factorial
- Try to come up with a general rule
for every other case
Also there are different types of recursive solutions, there's the divide and conquer approach which is useful for fractals and many others.
It would also help if you could work on simpler problems first just to get the hang of it. Some examples are solving for the factorial and generating the nth fibonacci number.
For references, I highly recommend Algorithms by Robert Sedgewick.
Hope that helps. Good luck.
