So you are a beginner and want to start programming for iphone or ipad and don't have an idea of where to start. Then you have come to the right place. At this point of time you may not own a mac for iphone development, or don't have an iphone. You may not even know that there exists a language called Objective C in which you will be doing your iphone development. Now lets go through the steps that you'll need to follow to start iphone development.
Step 1: Get a mac
First of all you'll need to buy an apple macintosh computer if you don't have it. Since macbook pro and iMacs are relatively expensive, if you don't have enough money you can buy a mac mini which are cheaper and costs about $600. Iphone development in other platforms is virtually impossible. You might be able to build a simple app using 3rd party tools but you would never be able to deploy them to app store. So rather than wasting time trying to build iphone app on other platforms go and buy a mac right now!
Step 2: Download Xcode
So you've bought a mac my dear beginner! If you don't know how to use a mac, you can visit Mac 101 to learn about using mac. Now you'll have to download XCode. So what is XCode? Well its an IDE for mac/iphone development. To download it, first go to http://developer.apple.com/iphone . You'll need to register as developer with apple before you can download the XCode IDE. So click on login and register. Now you can download the XCode for your mac OS. Installing XCode is pretty straightforward. You'll gradually learn how to use and take full advantage of XCode gradually. Teaching how to use XCode is beyond the scope of this tutorial. A good book to learn about XCode is XCode 3 unleashed by Fritz Anderson.
Step 3: Learn Objective C
Probably the biggest mistake a beginner would make while starting iphone development, is to jump into iphone development without learning the basics of Objective C. Its a mistake that I made. I started with apples sample iphone app tutorial when I didn't have any knowledge of Objective C. And I understood nothing. So I had to go back and study Objective C first. I learnt a lot about Objective C from Learn Objective–C on the Mac . Its a language with an odd syntax quite different from the languages you might be familiar with like C, C++ or Java. Objective C is an object oriented language but the fun part is that you can mix C with it.
Step 4: Learn iphone SDK
Phew, finally the real fun begins. You now have to learn the iphone SDK. There are a lot of books on learning iphone SDK and there always is the good ol' Apple's Iphone SDK Documentation. You can either download the documentation through XCode or just use the online documentation . I studied quite a few books while learning iphone development. These are some books that proved to be extremely helpful to me.
1. iPhone SDK Development
2. Beginning iPhone 3 Development: Exploring the iPhone SDK
3.The iPhone Developer's Cookbook
Step 5: Get developers license
So now you can build your own app huh! But you'll be able to test it only on the simulator and also you cannot deploy it to app store. For building your app to the device and deploying to the app store you'll need to get a paid developer license which costs $99.
Step 6: Buy iphone/ipod touch
Now that you have a developers license, you can buy an iphone or ipod touch to test your app on. You can learn about how to deploy your app to your device and the app store from apples program portal which will be available after you get developers license.
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