From IPhone Dev FAQ

Writing native applications for the iPhone is similar to writing software for any computer: there are specific languages, tools, SDKs, APIs, frameworks, caveats, and quirks to the iPhone OS. The SDK is extensive and provides support for building your user interface, network communications, background processing, location services, mapping, audio, video playback and recording, and so on. The iOS SDK is huge and you are not likely going to master everything anytime soon so focus first on the essentials, Foundation and UIKit, before moving into the specific frameworks your business or apps will be using.

Contents 1 Essential Reading 1.1 Learning ObjectiveC 1.2 Learning iPhone Dev 2 Tools 3 University Courses 4 WWDC10 5 Books 5.1 Intermediate and Advanced Topics 6 Essential Sites

Essential Reading

Learning ObjectiveC

• Objective-C 2.0 Programming Language
• Introduction to OOP with ObjectiveC

Learning iPhone Dev

• Getting Started With iPhone OS
• iPhone Human Interface Guidelines

Tools

First you will need an Apple Developer Connection membership. You will need this to get access to the tools and documentation for the current SDK. Next you will need Xcode if you plan on writing native applications. You can get it for free at the Apple Developer Network iPhone Dev Center.

The iPhone SDK includes Xcode, Instruments, the frameworks, sample code, and a ton of documentation. It's worth all the download time, disk space and learning curve. If you are new software development, this is an advanced environment.

The tools are only available for Mac OS X 10.6.

University Courses

Stanford University in collaboration with Apple has put all the videos for their Winter 2010 iPhone development class. There might not be a better introduction to get you off the ground than these classes. iPhone Application Development (Winter 2010)

University of Utah offers these classes CS4962-001 (Spring 2010).

WWDC10

This year, Apple decided to make all the session videos from WWDC10 available for free to paid iPhone dev members. This is great stuff and perhaps the best documentation and introduction to developing for iOS4 there is.

Books

• C Programming Language (2nd Edition) by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie.
• Programming in Objective-C 2.0 by Stephen Kochan
• Beginning iPhone 3 Development by Dave Mark and Jeff LaMarche
• iPhone Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide by Aaron Hillegass

Intermediate and Advanced Topics

• The iPhone Developer's Cookbook: Building Applications with the iPhone 3.0 SDK (2nd Edition) by Erica Sadun
• Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X (3rd Edition) by Aaron Hillegass (While this book is about Mac OS X development it covers a lot of the common ground.)

Essential Sites

• Screencasts from the Pragmatic Programmer
• Cocoa Dev Central
• iPhone SDK Articles
• iPhone Development Blog by Jeff LaMarche
• Cocoa With Love by Matt Gallagher
• NSBlog by Mike Ash
• CocoaDev
• My First iPhone Application