Note: Links to all books are at the bottom of the post; if you'd like to skip over all this dribble, head there now!
I was born a poor... wait that's a movie line. I became interested in computers back in the MS-DOS v3.x days (yeah go ahead a wikipedia that baby to see how old I am). My actual first computer was a Commodore 64. I had mine setup on a 13" color TV with dual 5 1/4" drives mostly running GEOS. Frackin sweet setup! Then once Windows 3.11 came out, wow that was cool stuff. Anyhow I did some BASIC programming and moved into Lotus 123 macros and automation then on to dBase III and IV. Did a bit of Visual basic programming and then moved into MS Access.
I know what you're thinking; for a "Mac-boy" you sure started out a Windows person. Yup, indeed I did...
So now you have an idea of where I came from and where I need to go is to have a complete grasp on Objective-C and iPhone programming. From there I can branch out and dig into my two favorite game engines; Cocos2D and SIO2.
Sorry, back to books; I already purchased "The Developers Cookbook" but honestly it is a book with recipes and did not help me that much. I went through the Stanford classes but didn't finish the final project so I dropped the ball on that (those courses are excellent though, if you haven't checked them out by all means head over to iTunes U and download them all, they are FREE!). I had also already purchased the first edition of "Learning Objective-C" and started going through it when I found that it is quite outdated, at least in terms of following along with Xcode. Please note I highly recommend the book, just make sure you pick up either edition that says it is for Objective-C 2.0 because you need to have a complete grasp on all the concepts of Objective-C to do actual iPhone development.
I follow Jeff LaMarche's blog and know that he and Dave Mark put out an iPhone Development book and that they also just released an update to it that deals with the recent 3.x changes. So that's where I started; went to Amazon.com and found the book and grabbed it. Once I started reading it the authors quickly recommended an Objective-C primer of sorts as they were not going to focus on teaching the fundamentals of Objective-C but iPhone development (radical, since that's why I bought the book ;-) ). I ordered a copy of this book and this is where I am (re)starting. Oh yeah the name, "Learning Objective-C on the Mac". Perfect since I don't care about the Microsoft Obj-C implementation, just how it works on a Mac. I can tell you this; I'm only about 1/2 way through and it is great! Very easy to read and the examples are all done with Xcode 3.1 (so it's not that far off) and really make sense. I'm excited to finish the book and the projects so that I can start with the iPhone book.
Update: Remembered this great video series that may help others -> check it out: johncmurphy
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