A Few Resources to Get Started With iPhone App Development

Want to write an iPhone app? Assuming you have a couple of necessary prerequisites, namely a Mac and an iPhone or iPod Touch, it’s not too hard to get started. It is best if you have some programming experience, as even I had a bit of a learning curve with my solid understanding of PHP and JavaScript. Assuming a little bit of programmatical knowledge, here are a few resources to help you get started with iPhone development.

Books

  • iPhone Application Development For Dummies — This was the first book on iPhone development that I read. It’s a good intro to the topic, though it skims over the details of Objective-C faster than is probably good, instead focusing on the Cocoa framework. For the language itself, the author has a separate book, Objective-C for Dummies.
  • Beginning iPhone SDK Programming with Objective-C — This book doesn’t hold your hand as much as the For Dummies book, which makes things difficult if you don’t already have a little bit of an understanding of Objective-C and Cocoa. It is more in-depth though.
  • Cocoa and Objective-C: Up and Running — I have not read this book, but it is by the author of the Cocoa Dev Central website…and an O’Reilly Press book as well.

Websites

  • Cocoa Dev Central — This is probably the quickest and most friendly way to learn Objective-C and Cocoa online.
  • Mobiletuts+ — Yes, Envato has a mobile development Tuts+ blog. (It was only a matter of time…) You can expect the same sort of high-quality tutorials as Nettuts+ and Psdtuts+.
  • Stack Overflow — Having trouble figuring something out? Ask a question and get a variety of responses within minutes. It’s like Digg or Reddit, but for finding solutions to programming problems.