Classical optimal control methods, notably Pontryagin's Maximum (Minimum) Principle (PMP) can be employed, together with Hamiltonians, to determine optimal system weights in Artificial Neural dynamical systems. A new learning rule based on weight equations derived using PMP is shown to be suitable for both discrete- and continuous-time systems, and moreover, can also be applied to feedback networks. Preliminary testing shows that this PMP learning rule compares favorably with Standard BackPropagations (SBP) on the XOR problem.