I don't have much experience of babies but I plenty of experience of sleep deprivation through being kept awake due to noise or difficult shift patterns. It is such a problem if you are meant to study or work. I would just say that you can only push yourself so far. To do more than that may make you ill or perform badly, even if you keep reading all the hard books. Perhaps you could have a little sleep in the day to make up for the lack during the night.

I have used enough caffeine for work and studies to know how it creates insomnia. I could not give up my coffee but try to take it earlier in the day. I also think that when coffee stops working it is a sign you have overused it. I often take over the counter tablets to enable me to sleep because I find that if I don't get enough sleep I can't function properly. I am not suggesting that you should take such tablets yourself but I do believe that you might do worse in your study if you just force yourself to study more and survive with hardly any sleep.

I also hope that you get some advice which is more geared up to someone struggling with life around babies, because that is one of the few problems I have not encountered so far.

I think I agree with Jack here. Studying when you're that deprived of sleep is a lost cause, you simply won't get the desired effect because you'll lose the ability to concentrate on the reading. This means that you're asking the wrong question. You ought to be asking how to care for your baby in a way which allows you to get better sleep.

Firstly, congrats on the baby. Luckily for me I had 6 weeks of paternity leave and I commonly worked nights so getting up in the middle of the night wasn't a big deal for me . Clearly your baby is getting way, way more than 3 hours of sleep a day, so sleep when the baby sleeps.