Anki

Anki flashcard decks

Anki is a nice program for creating and studying flashcards on a mobile phone. The Android and desktop versions are free, the iPhone version costs $.

Strategy

Anki is useful for learning small, short concepts - not large, sprawling concepts.

If you have a large, complicated concept, split it into parts.

For example, instead of "What is the factory design pattern?", instead ask, "When is a factory design pattern useful?" or "What are the 3 things a singleton implementation requires?"

In addition to making the facts small and consumable, make them imminently practical and driven by experience. (Example: if you're studying a language, don't dump a big word list into flashcards.)

Resetting a Deck

Because Anki thinks it is so great at taking care of your study needs, it thinks no user could possibly ever need to reset a deck. (Why is so much software designed to act like a militant pedant insisting you do it their way or not at all?)

If you get sick of stupid timers and schedules, if you screw things up, or if you can't figure out the system and need to get your flashcards into another more reasonable study program, you can export your deck to an anki file, and uncheck the box about including scheduling info. This strips all the scheduling, due date, times reviewed, and other scheduling crap from the flashcards.

Why Anki Is Not So Great

One of things I least like about Anki is that it uses some kind of complicated, mysterious system to decide what cards to show you and when. The documentation makes an attempt to explain the system, but the explanation is sorely lacking in details. Additionally, there are all kinds of special terms and different modes (learning, new, due, review, etc.) littering the program, none of which follow a logical system or are explained to the user.

This means that when you're trying to brute-force your way to your flashcards so that you can, oh, gee, I dunno, FREAKING STUDY THEM, you are probably going to see 15 or 20 brand-new cards and then Anki will say "Okay thanks see you tomorrow."

WTF???