I just started microcontrollers, almost two weeks now, but use AVR chips.
You can really save some time on the charactors, be pulling the data table out of somebody else's code (yeah, cheating, stealing, whatever...). Doesn't exactly have to be a POV project, could be for LED or LCD (custom charactors), something like that. Doesn't even matter what chip its for, or what language, just that charactors are 5 dots (bits) wide, and 7 high, which is very common.
There are several POV tutorials on the web, that go in detail about the how and why, so should be to bad figuring out how to use the data table you found. There was a good one for a propeller clock, and remember reading through one about bicycle spokes. Search on Hack-A-Day.com, pretty sure that's were I saw some of these.