I am not new to iOS development, and I do not consider myself an expert either. I own and have read more books than I wish to mention. I am going to offer my opinion on what I think if a good set of resources for developers new to the iOS platform.
First off, the first place to start, and the place with the most helpful and largest volume of support content is Apple’s developer site. Apple has some great books (aka PDFs) to read, a large amount of support reference documents and sample code. Several of the must reads are their Obj-C guide, the Human Interface Guidelines, a few best practices PDFs and if you are a registered developer make sure to read the PLA (or Programmer License Agreement).
http://developer.apple.com/iphone/index.action
Also, if you log in to the Apple Developer site and you are a registered developer, the 2010 WWDC are very good. There are over 100 videos and they are on iTunesU and you can download them for free, unlike the 2009 WWDC videos that you need to pay for.
http://developer.apple.com/videos/
Apress has a great series of iPhone development books that came out prior to iOS 4. I think these are excellent books and they have a great support site and developer forum to back the book up. These Apress books do an excellent job of stepping you through building an iOS application, and covering a large amount of controls and topics.
Beginning iPhone 3 Development – http://www.apress.com/book/view/9781430224594
More iPhone 3 Development – http://www.apress.com/book/view/143022505X
One of the most well known writers of Mac OS X development books has written an excellent iPhone book as well. One of the great aspects of this book is the writer covers the MVC setup for most of the applications covered in the book. The writer also approaches the chapters from a viewpoint to teach you the language and help you learn while you build an app, rather than from walking you through the steps to build an app like I feel the Apress books do. Not that the Apress books are bad, as I find them to be a great resource. The Apress books are also good if you are working on an app and want a quick walk through to add functionality for certain controls. But, the Aaron Hillegass iPhone Development book is also a great book to read and learn from.
iPhone Development – http://bignerdranch.com/book/iphone_programming_the_big_nerd_ranch_guide
If you want to learn the nuts and bolts of the Objective-C language, I feel Stephen G. Kochan has one of the best books out there. Just make sure you get the Objective-C 2.0 2Ed version, as there are others.
Programming in Objective-C 2.0 – Amazon
If you want a great book that covers several areas of iOS development outside of the coding, such as Xcode, memory management utilities, source control, unit testing and some of Xcode’s other support tools, this is a great book.
Learn Xcode Tools for Mac OS X and iPhone Development – http://www.apress.com/book/view/9781430272212
Another great resource is Stanford University’s iPhone Dev Class which is available on iTunesU.
http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs193p/cgi-bin/drupal/downloads-2010-winter
There is also a Google Group for Auditors or other non students to check out for the Stanford Univ iPhone Dev Class.
http://groups.google.com/group/iphone-appdev-auditors/
Thanks for checking out my article, and feel free to stop by and check out my mobile device applications http://www.pruetsoftware.com/.
Hello World coded by Dayton 