mining in a pool or solo

What are the pros and cons of each?

Depends on the blockchain. New altcoins with low hashrate you can get away with mining solo. On Bitcoin blockchain, there is no way you'd ever mine a block against competitor's hashrates. For Bitcoin, unless you're pushing alot of TH's you need to join a pool.

I don't know the ins-and-outs, but my understanding is when you're apart of a pool you get to split the reward. This is good because you're more likely to succeed in completing a block with a pool than on your own (unless you have a decent rig), especially with some of the more mature coins. You could probably mine some of the newer alt coins solo and do fine. Obviously, going solo means you'll get the full reward. I've not gotten into mining simply because I don't have hardware that's good enough to make it profitable for me with either solo or pool. I'd be losing money on electricity, etc.

I can't mine my laptop sucks