I have an interesting anecdote. When I started my CS degree almost a decade and a half ago, my dad refused to get me an Internet connection for our home. To giv

I have an interesting anecdote. When I started my CS degree almost a decade and a half ago, my dad refused to get me an Internet connection for our home. To give you an idea how uncommon this was already, during the first week an interview amongst the 375 enrolled students was conducted. I was the only one without a DSL or fiber connection at his disposal. I was furious, but in retrospective it may have been the reason behind my success. No connection forced me doing lots of things differently. For programming work, I relied only on offline documentation (man pages, MSDN...) and I set up my own servers instead of telnet-ing to the uni machines. The learning curve was a lot steeper, but after some struggle I was way more productive than my peers. For freshman and sophomore theoretical courses, I simply cherry-picked top books with extreme care cause I knew I couldn't rely on help coming from the brand new forums for TAing our school had set up. Students hacked around exercises, but I had to fight the Dragon Book, Concrete Mathematics and a few others. It ended up as a huge success for me. I ranked as student #1 not only in my fairly large school, but in the whole country where a few thousands graduated from CS at the same time. This made me appreciate the value of deep and hard knowledge good books provide. Now, many years later I am struggling to return to that lifestyle while keeping some online presence...