I've been doing this for almost a year and I agree it accelerates programming languages/libraries learning. Not having to switch between my text editor and the language/library reference lets me focus on the hard problems.
As a programming languages geek, a few months ago a realized that every time I came back to a language that I had learned earlier, I'd forgotten a good chunk of it, rendering all my efforts in vain. So I started using Anki. Here are a few tips from my experience:
- Koans[0] are great as source material. They're available in almost every mainstream language, the problems are usually solvable in less than a minute and you can just copy & paste.
- Always open your repl and type your answer. Otherwise you're not really thinking about the problem but just memorizing the answer.
Interested, in particular the Python ones! Do they go over the Python standard library and "pythonic" idioms?
Maybe you could put them on github, perhaps?
Only a few weeks ago I first read about the spaced repetition technique, and my first thought was "what would I want to memorize? maybe I could use this to learn the parameters and usage of Python (or some other language)'s standard library" ... and there it is, on HN, including someone offering a set of flash cards, saving me that work :)
Although creating one's own flash cards is a good first step in learning, I wonder how good it is (in that particular regard) to someone already reasonably familiar with the standard library, just wanting to save time by less looking up in the docs?
As a programming languages geek, a few months ago a realized that every time I came back to a language that I had learned earlier, I'd forgotten a good chunk of it, rendering all my efforts in vain. So I started using Anki. Here are a few tips from my experience:
- Koans[0] are great as source material. They're available in almost every mainstream language, the problems are usually solvable in less than a minute and you can just copy & paste.
- Always open your repl and type your answer. Otherwise you're not really thinking about the problem but just memorizing the answer.
[0] https://github.com/search?q=koans&ref=commandbar
*Edit: BTW, I've got lots of Ruby, Python, Clojure, Erlang/OTP and a few Dylan flash cards, if anyone's interested.