Also, Anki is free for both desktop (every OS) and Android.
That said, if you want to give it a shot, I'd suggest starting with the desktop version of Anki. Make your own deck, because making a deck is its own form of studying. Use it for a while, and if you feel that it's something that you want to invest more time in, get the mobile app.
Oh, one other thing I'd like to mention about SRS. SRS techniques are designed to manage HUGE numbers of cards, ranging from a few hundred to tens of thousands. If you have less than a hundred or so cards, it's just a really smart flash card system - you could review all the cards every couple days without much trouble. People who really get into SRS tend to use it for everything, because it's an easy way to integrate more knowledge into their existing knowledge-management framework. As such, you should be careful about recommendations for using it for one particular field. The people doing the recommending usually have lower friction regarding adding a couple hundred programming cards to their deck than you will as a beginner.
StickyStudy is cheaper and so far works fine with my < 200 element deck. Only problem I had is that it sometimes crashes after searching for a word and then clearing the search-box.
The way I use it is to just create a card or two for every useful trick, library function, command line option or whatever I encounter that looks interesting or useful. The area it worked best so far is git - I no longer fumble for that elusive option to 'log' or 'diff' that I know exists but I just cannot remember it because I use it just rarely enough to forget it between use cases.
I do not create large decks upfront so I'm using it as a notepad rather than study book.
Anki does look a bit raw, but worked absolutely fine for me (though transferring LaTeX-ed decks between devices was a hassle). There's also memrise.com, which mostly focuses on languages, but allows users to create content on any subject. It's also more easily shareable there, I think.
In any case, the science behind SRSs is good, and in my experience it helps a lot with memorisation!
I think he has some good points; you can definitely program a lot faster in a language in which you have memorized much of the standard library and the API/frameworks you are using heavily. I don't really think SRS has a place when it comes to learning a new language. To me it makes more sense once you are certain you are going to specialize in a language/platform. I am still yet to try it.
e.g. the C one presents the code in an awful centred and line-broken fashion which completely obliterates the location of significant comments and the like.
(But I believe the SRS people recommend you make your own decks as part of the process.)
https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/491274358
In a nutshell, pressing the button this extension adds to Anki either pastes the contents of your clipboard as syntax-highlighted code, or applies syntax-highlighting to the text you have selected.
This makes code much, much easier to parse, especially when using Anki on a mobile device.
On the plus side, checking the app to see if such an option exists found a bunch of options I didn't know about that will make my experience more pleasant. Ta.
Anybody try or use this technique? It looks interesting and sounds reasonable and effective. I took a peek at Anki but have to admit it looks messy (and the iOS app is $25, which is def. on the high end of the iOS pricing scale). I'd be curious to hear others' experience in this area...