quote:Original post by flangazor

quote:Original post by _the_phantom_
ouch, missing out on sleep is the most unhealthy thing anyone can advise, personaly i can stay awake on 6h sleep but i've always needed 8h sleep to be at peak performance.

Personaly while I was at school (and we are talking early 90s here) I was doing mostly BASIC programming and some Assembler around the age of 15/16 (1995/96) and i never touched C++ until i went to Uni in 1998.
As BillPo says, the trick is to keep your social life alive at the same time, i didnt manage to do that for a number of reasons and while i dont regret the way I grew up it has since caused me a few 'issues' in the rest of my life which might have been avoided

[engage rant mode]
tbh, threads like this (no offense to the OP btw, this is just a pet rant of mine) are a good sign of whats going wrong with the world, kids being tested to death at school and people worrying about what they want to do after school before they have even cleared 11 years of age in some case :|
Just seems to me that we are pushing people harder and harder, all in search the mythical 'highest standard' and not worrying about the lack of childhood, the extra stress and the fact that, in all probabilty, this kids are going to burn out at an earlier and earlier age.
[rant mode off]

WRT sleep, thats only you that needs 8h of sleep. People vary widely. Rudy Guliani famously only sleeps three hours a night and Margaret Thatcher only sleeps one hour a night.

WRT school, I agree to some extent. Having constructive hobbies is one of the best things you can do and is often more important than school.

the advised amount is actually seven hours, doing otherwise can cause heartattacks at the age of fourty (don't mean to spook anyone out or anything)

edit: DAMN MY CRAPPY ENGLISH


[edited by - picklejuice on January 18, 2004 3:54:41 PM]

Back to the original topic - I took the AP computer science course at my school last year, which really helped me stay on track and understand the things that so many people in these forums ask about like pointers and linked lists. I wanted to re-take it again this year (they switched over the curriculum to Java), but I got suckered into joining ASB. oh well

It wasn''t easy though - it took me 6 to 8 hours on average for each program, and I usually had two due every week. Sometimes I would only be able to turn in one. 90% of my time was spent debugging them - figuring out why one or two bugs were preventing the program from working. It was a hard process, but I''m a much better coder now.

It was cool though, it really launched me into the world of programming. I''ve never looked back.

quote:Original post by Ekim_Gram
I just go home, program and read for a few hours, then do my homework and sleep. I usually only get 4-6 hours of sleep a night.


R.I.P. Mark Osback
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Wow, thats crazy. I program for a few hours on the weekends, and thats about it. I do most of my learning during breaks, like the Summer and Winter. This winter, however, I didn''t learn anything new... I was gone for all but 4 days, and in those 4 days, I just messed around with MySQL. Oh wait.. I learned a bit about PHP and MySQL. Thats about it.

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