As an electrical engineer, I'm quite pissed off with people giving off all this false knowledge.
Car batteries love being charged and hate being empty. Lithium-ion hates being fully charged and likes being discharged. I think everyone knows that and "common knowledge" is based on that.
Now here's something that common knowledge seems to forget:
1. If you let your battery die, it will be permanently damaged. Discharging is nice.. but if you ever let it run out, it's broken.
2. Battery chargers are designed to keep your battery charged in a way for it to remain healthy. Removing batteries does not improve lifetime in a modern machine. This is also why battery chargers and batteries are very pricey. If you buy an imitation, uncertified charger or battery, your battery will die or blow up unless you put special effort into making sure it doesn't and you fucking deserve it. Seriously, the cheapest (and safest) thing you can do is buy an expensive battery/charger.
3. If you're going to store it, store it at about half charge. Full charge will weaken it, but shouldn't be a critical problem. I do it a lot on full, and even 3 years later, all my laptop batteries work fine. If you store your battery while it's empty it will die. 40% is good, 15% is VERY BAD.
4. It's fine to pull out your battery from your laptop when you're using it. But remember that when you pull your battery, it's not getting the charge-discharge exercise that your charger gives it. Instead, you're storing them aside at full capacity. This is fine if you plug it in again sometimes, but if you go for like many months with your battery put aside, not good.
I've never had a problem with my laptop or cellphone batteries. All of them last fine up to the point I stop using the laptop/phone. The ones that do get damaged are the ones that I leave nearly/completely empty because I'm too lazy to charge them a little. Electrical engineers really try to design products that last longest with "normal" use, meaning that you shouldn't have to pull your battery out or keep it in the fridge and stuff.
On the contrary, some people prefer to listen to "common knowledge", pull out their battery from the laptop when using the laptop, etc, and they complain that their batteries still don't last. There is some correlation there.