It begins with the most basic of recursive algorithms and slowly guides the reader to more and more advanced applications. Most importantly, however, it is a unified treatment so that by the end of the book the reader will have learned that a sophisticated recursive algorithm to find the median in linear time has a great deal in common with a simple recursive algorithm to output an array. Once one learns to use the recursive paradigm it is easy to use and is often the correct way to go.
Many people scoff at recursive algorithms claiming that they are too inefficient.
Certainly many recursive algorithms can be retooled to an iterative form and be made to run faster by some factor that is typically small. But this is usually irrelevant. For example, I wrote iterative and recursive functions to find factorials. Since very little is done inside the recursive function, the price we pay for using recursion will stand out. 300 times in 100 seconds using the recursive function while it only took 75 seconds in the iterative case.