I can't believe you have a link to Gatto on your homepage but still post this.. this.. thing regarding education. I apologise, but you've hit one of my buttons so here we go... before you read further, note that these comments are not directed to any one person. I'm not bagging anyone out.

Kids, nothing is a bigger damned lie than the idea that you have to work really hard to gain knowledge. It's a fallacy started by twits and repeated by people who should know better. There is no reason why you can't learn by reading over someone elses work. You don't have to do every single bit yourself.

There will always be people who tell you that you won't succeed unless you do every problem at the end of the chapter, or the people who tell you that you have to program everything yourself to improve your programming skills

But the people who do every problem in the textbook are often the people who come third in exams, or the 'next assignment', behind the people who live and breath the subject. And the people who program everything themselves are often the ones who turn out loads of dross and make stupid buffer overflow errors.

Please dump this very puritan attitude towards work. The road to success is not long and hard. It's long and filled with fascinating and beautiful experiences - unless you stop to flagellate yourself with every problem in the back of the chapter.

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Jeremy
I didn't believe in evil until I dated it.