Question: I am looking for some relatively simple data sets for testing and comparing different training methods for artificial neural networks. I would like data that won't take too much pre-processing to turn it into my input format of a list of inputs and outputs (normalized to 0-1). Any links appreciated.

Answer: 
<http://neuroph.sourceforge.net/sample_projects.html>
There is many sample projects and famous data.
I learnt ANNs as an undergraduate by using them to perform OCR (Optical Character Recognition). I think this is a nice use case.

Scan in two pages of text, extract the letters and form training/testing datasets (e.g. 8x8 pixels leads to 64 input nodes), label the data. Train the ANN and get a score using the testing dataset. Change the network topology/parameters and tune the network to get the best score.