While working through Japanese the Spoken Language (JSL), I feel the need to make Anki cards for the spoken words that I'm having trouble recalling the meanings of. Now, I haven't yet decided exactly what card format is best, but I was dreading having to type in accents on the romanized words. (See the introduction to JSL to see what these accents are.) So, I wrote a quick program to allow easy input of accented words.
As with natural languages, most of the tools are poor, most of the methods are ineffective, and the books unreadable. Successful language learners gather quality resources and use proven references. The same applies to programming. Here I organize programming into four application areas with my recommended resources for each.
Since reading about Lewis Carroll's game of Doublets in Pappas' Joy of Mathematics, I have loved the game and often thought about graphs (networks) in terms of Doublets. Here I present the basics of embeddings, and demonstrate using a genetic algorithm to optimize an embedding of a list of three-letter words from a few games of Doublets.