I actually made an Anki deck when I was learning CSS two and a half years ago and I found it was well worth the effort. Since CSS isn't something I'm nearly as interested as programming, I didn't go that far with it—just the basics of the flow, the box model, display, positioning and the most frequently used portions of CSS.<p>Absolutely everything I memorized, I could have just looked up. I still did have to look things up sometimes. But it really is a lot better to know something than to have to Google it. Not only is it faster, but it also lets you start grouping the things you know well together and think in larger chunks. Just SRS isn't enough to learn anything, or especially how to apply it. But SRS is super efficient at improving you on one dimension that has a positive effect on others. In that sense, it's much like weightlifting is for sports.
This paper was published in 1993, and not 1998, as the HN title currently says.<p>You may wish to read the excellent Wired article from 2008 about the somewhat eccentric author of this paper, Piotr Woźniak.<p><a href="http://www.wired.com/2008/04/ff-wozniak/" rel="nofollow">http://www.wired.com/2008/04/ff-wozniak/</a>
I have seen 'Janki method' earlier:
- <a href="http://www.jackkinsella.ie/2011/12/05/janki-method.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.jackkinsella.ie/2011/12/05/janki-method.html</a>
I can see how a memorization aid like spaced repetition could actually improve your productivity in 1993, but in 2015, it's neither feasible nor necessary for programmers to memorize all the stuff we use, so I'm not seeing this as terribly useful nowadays.