Just a quick link dump for now./p>
http://weka.wiki.sourceforge.net/Primer http://yann.lecun.com/exdb/mnist/ http://www.citeulike.org/user/jdu/article/3906709 http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=856871 http://alex.seewald.at/digits/ http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1063572 http://www.generation5.org/content/2004/simple_ocr.asp http://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/ http://matthewstpeter.com/old/pdf/digit.pdf http://logic.mimuw.edu.pl/Grant2003/prace/GMalvernTrung1.pdf