Try Ruby is a clever interactive tutorial that would work well for either scenario. It takes the form of an in-browser command line Ruby interpreter with a pane along the bottom that gives you instructions. It tells you to type in a command, and explains what exactly is going on.

Doesn’t that make you want to learn Ruby? I went through a few steps, from basic arithmetic to strings to arrays, and it was kind of fun. Having to type out everything as you go seems to reinforce your understanding of what you’re doing better than simply reading a book. And once you’ve got the language down, you should be able to move on to watching screencasts for the Rails framework. I may have to give Ruby a try sometime.

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.

It’s eighteen pages of code snippets with amusing comments, ranging from simple warnings like “// Magic. Do not touch.” to cleverly-named objects:

Exception up = new Exception("Something is really wrong.");
throw up;  //ha ha

It’s a fun read if you’re into programming at all.

The thread has since been locked, so if you have any to add you can post them here.

iPhone Application Development For Dummies is a good primer on building applications for the iPhone or iPod Touch. It covers the basic theory over the first few chapters, and then moves on to building a simple View-based application. I haven’t finished the book quite yet, as I’m working my way through the tutorials as I read, but the book seems to cover all of the basics quite well. There are parts on data storage, input events, and many other things that are critical to iPhone development.

I’m finding the book to be a bit challenging, as I don’t have any real desktop programming experience, other than BASIC if that counts. I don’t think I’d recommend it to someone who doesn’t have a strong grasp of at least one programming language with a C-style syntax, such as PHP or Java. Knowledge of object-oriented programming is important, in addition to more basic skills such as dealing with variables and control structures. If you’re a total programming newbie, I would recommend reading a good introductory book first, and then moving on to iPhone Application Development for Dummies.

I’ve enjoyed what I’ve read of the book so far, and I hope that, by the time I’m done, I’ll have a good enough grasp of things to develop an idea I’ve had for awhile into an app.

Twitter’s API has spawned hundreds of mashups and third party software apps, but now it’s growing even further — outside sites have begun mimicking an API to piggyback on Twitter clients.

It started last week with a clever hack by WordPress contributors which allows WordPress.com users to post and read their WordPress.com blogs through third-party Twitter apps like Tweetie 2 for the iPhone.

Now Tumblr has joined in on the fun, allowing you to post and read Tumblr blogs through any third-party Twitter app that allows you to change the API endpoint.

While that’s interesting, I don’t really like it. Emulating another service’s API will only result in problems as Twitter updates their API methods. Developers of Twitter clients will update their software, and companies like WordPress.com will have to be quick to re-work their fake Twitter API, otherwise things could break. It just seems like a bad plan to base something like that off of a third party’s proprietary framework, rather than that of an open standard.

Gilbertson continues to mention Dave Winer’s thoughts on how Twitter’s API is (without Twitter’s consent) becoming an “open standard,” and how that’s a bad idea.

For one thing, Twitter is a private company with its own goals for its own API. In order to really become a standard, Twitter would need to freeze its API, ensuring that it doesn’t change. Since Twitter has been doing interesting (and sometimes backwards-incompatible) things with it, like adding geotagging support and changing how replies are handled, and we don’t want to see that stop.

But honestly, is it really that hard to switch to a dedicated application to update your blog? WordPress provides an iPhone application for just that purpose, and it doesn’t have a 140 character limit.

Twitter API Is Becoming Far More than Just an API for Twitter [MonkeyBites]

Stackoverflow is sort of like the anti-experts-exchange (minus the nausea-inducing sleaze and quasi-legal search engine gaming) meets wikipedia meets programming reddit. It is by programmers, for programmers, with the ultimate intent of collectively increasing the sum total of good programming knowledge in the world.

I couldn’t have said it better myself. It’s sort of like Reddit or Digg, but centered around answering everyone’s questions instead of sharing links. If you want to know the best way to go about doing something in PHP or Python, pose your question on Stack Overflow and watch as you receive at least one thoughtful answer within the half hour.

While Stack Overflow started it all, today there are two sister sites. Server Fault is for server administration and other IT-related questions, and Super User is for more general computer-related questions.

The sites’ community is quite nice, and there’s always something interesting going on. You can always learn something by reading the answer threads, maybe contribute to the conversation if you’re knowledgeable of the subject.

It’s recommended that you avoid posting “questions that are subjective, argumentative, or require extended discussion,” on the grounds that they’re not discussion boards so much as places to go for help. Personally, I like seeing an occasional discussion-oriented thread, or a questions that asks for opinions, so long as that sort of thing doesn’t get out of hand.

Anyway, pick your area of interest (programming, IT, or general computing) and have a look. Stack Overflow, Super User, and Server Fault are definitely worth having in your bookmarks for that time when you need an informative answer. I only wish I had more time to spend there…