title: Big-O for Eight Year Olds?
body: <p>I'm asking more about what this means to my code.  I understand the concepts mathematically, I just have a hard time wrapping my head around what they mean conceptually.  For example, if one were to perform an O(1) operation on a data structure, I understand that the number of operations it has to perform won't grow because there are more items.  And an O(n) operation would mean that you would perform a set of operations on each element.  Could somebody fill in the blanks here?</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>Like what exactly would an O(n^2) operation do?</li>
  <li>And what the heck does it mean if an operation is O(n log(n))?</li>
  <li>And does somebody have to smoke crack to write an O(x!)?</li>
  </ul>