Is it true that sleep consume less power than boot? (MacBook pro late 2011 model)

Question

I have 3 questions here to ask:
1. Some say that sleep consume less power than boot, but some say it isn't. Which is true? and how it can be?
2. Is it true that charging your macbook pro until 100% then unplug it will make cycle count go faster than using AC power all day and ONLY using battery when we couldn't find AC outlet will make it slower?
3. i found that some macbook user leave their macbook charged all the time and some macbook user prefer use battery all the time. Which way is better? i have observed and looked at any apple help topics but couldn't get the answer without any experience from you guys...
I'm so conserned with these issues...
Thank you for your time though, i hope i can find the best solutions here....

Answer 1

Regarding question 1, that's a meaningless question.  Boot uses a specific amount of power, dependent on how much stuff has to start up on your machine and what hardware you have, while sleep uses a trickle over time, so whether this is true depends on what interval of sleeping you're comparing to boot.  There will be a break even point somewhere, but where that might be isn't clear.
Apple recommends sleep over shutdown unless you're going to be away from the computer for a couple days or more.  Of course, I can't find a reference to that document now, but I know it was there at one point in time.  I don't think that the entire issue is power-related, as boot will stress the hardware slightly more (lots of reading from and writing to the hard drive, etc) than sleep.
As to questions 2 and 3, the answer is the same for both.  Your battery lasts for a finite number of cycles before losing capacity.  (How many cycles is a good question, and not an easy one to answer.)  A cycle is defined as going from full to empty, but can be broken up as well.  For example, if you start from full, drain halfway, charge to full again and drain to halfway again, that's one cycle.  So, the more times you charge your battery, the faster it will wear out, but how you do it doesn't matter much.
There are a couple gotchas, though.  First, a battery can wear out prematurely if you never let the electrons "turn over."  You need to use it on battery power sometimes, though it doesn't have to be daily by any means.  Second, if you drain the battery fully, that's not very good for modern batteries.  I wouldn't worry about it now and then, but don't make it a habit of draining it fully.  (Some people erroneously recommend frequently draining the battery fully and then charging it back up to "condition" the battery, but that is not actually good practice.  All Mac portables with built-in batteries do not need conditioning.)
Finally, all this is fairly irrelevant if it interferes with the way you need to use the machine.  Use the machine the way you need to use it, and don't worry so much about adjusting your needs to fit the battery's needs.  If that means you have to replace the battery a little more frequently, so be it.  They're not that expensive in the grand scheme of things.