Understanding the Amino Acids
I'm sure there are lots of ways of handling this, but there are only 20 of them (more or less).  I really wanted to figure out how the amino acids resulted in the resulting protein structure.  So I started to break them down into categories.  The categories cannot draw boundaries exactly since one amino acid might belong to several categories in a unique way, but it starts to give you a sense of what the sidechains do.


  Aliphatic : G A L I V M P
  Aromatic : F Y W H
  Polarizable : F Y W H M C R
  Polar: S T Q N D E K C
  Small: A S T G C
  Large : F Y W H R K
  Strong Structural variation: P G


you still have to memorize them eventually, but you can make it easier to put them in categories and in these groups its easier to bring them to mind.