The iPhone is a platform for coding newbies

I've never seen www.mastersofthevoid.com before but seems to be written in an approachable way and the the site has a simple and pleasing design. http://www.audiocdcloner.com It's awesome that there are so many easy ways to learn these days.

I wouldn't bother with the old K&R book honestly. Actually, the "C" in the name of Objective C is a misnomer. There's really nothing C-ish about Obj C, certainly not in its syntax. This might sound odd, but I'd start learning Actionscript 3.0. It's somewhat Java-esque, but not as draconian in its structure, and doesn't have the memory management issues of C. The learning curve is a lot less steep than diving into C/C++, but AS3 is still a powerful language and has a very C syntax. Learn the basics, get a grasp on object-oriented programming, then switch over to Obj C. For AS3, I'd pick up Moock's "Essential Actionscript 3.0" book. Good luck.

I have a desire to learn programming, since I have a desire for an iPhone-app that no-one seems to be providing. I studied it a bit in the yesteryears (C++ andJava mostly, but I have forgotten most of it), but I would have to learn Objective-C to program for the iPhone. looking at comments about newbioes diving in to Obj-C, the first comment seems to be "learn C first". And the premier book about learning C is the K&R-book. I'm currently reading that, but it too assumes that the reader has some programming-knowledge (Pascal in this case). It seems like a vicious cycle....

That said, I'm going through the K&R-book, and if/when I get the grips of it, I'll move to Cocoa and Obj-C. Here's to hoping.

I feel sorry for anyone whose first exposure to programming is Objective C. Even for seasoned developers it can be a morass of a language to wade through.

This reminds me of the commodore 64 when it became really popupar.... even moms wanted to write basic so they could be there receipe in there !

I'm one of those newbie actually writing an iPhone application that I hope will be for sale by june.

http://buildingiphoneapps.blogspot.com

iPhone platform is already strapped for memory so GC is not possible at the moment. The retain / release mechanism used in Cocoa is almost childs' play with some practice, you just have to learn the conventions. Objective-C is a great language that has a nice balance of control and freedom and a wonderful API. Although, imho, Foundation is lacking in choices of data structures.

http://iBetaTest.com :)

The reason all the "noobs" is because of all those dream stories like Ethan Nicholas. People, especially kids, see that and think that iPhone development is better than getting a summer job, and in some cases, it is.

I personally am learning Objective C right now, but I'm not a "noob" as I already know C++.

Objective C is a great language... in 1989. There's a reason why so many applications on iTunes crash regularly and suffer from performance issues. Objective C is a difficult language to deal with. With no garbage collection, you're just begging newbies to create monstrous memory leaks, which account for most of the unexplained application shutdowns that occur regularly with the iPhone. Heck, Webkit shuts down unceremoniously due to lack of memory and that was written by people who really should know better. And new programmers are expected to be able to juggle system resources? Good thing Apple isn't keeping applications out of iTunes for being buggy.

True, true, true!

As a matter of fact, my head is at this moment a little dazzling with codes. I'm busy with Masters of the Void http://www.masters-of-the-void.com A great tut for understanding C.
As soon as C is getting familiar for me, I'm heading over to http://cocoadevcentral.com/

I do have some ideas for some apps. For me its just a new thing that I want to explore. And dreaming about making that killah-app which brings in a shipload of money, is fairly a good stimuli.